Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy reveals that tissue culture conditions affect the macromolecular phenotype of human embryonic stem cells

Abstract

We employed Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy to investigate the effects of different tissue culture environments on the FTIR spectra of undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and their differentiated progeny. First we tested whether there were any possible spectral artifacts resulting from the use of transflectance measurements by comparing them with transmission measurements and found no evidence of these concluding that the lack of any differences resulted from the homogeneity of the dried cytospun cellular monolayers. We found that hESCs that were enzymatically passaged onto mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) in KOSR based hESC medium, hESCs enzymatically p..