Year 1

An important problem in stem cell and regenerative medicine research has been the ability to quickly and cheaply generate and characterize reprogrammed stem cells from defined human patients. The primary goal of our project is to address this need by developing new technologies that allow stem cell lines to be characterized in large mixed pools as opposed to one by one. Our new methods use flow cytometry and highly sensitive methods for detecting the activity of genes in the cell lines. We made excellent progress in the first year and reduced flow cytometry methods to practice taking advantage of a method called fluorescence cell barcoding. Methods for analyzing activity of genes and chromosome number are in progress and being tested. Our ultimate goal is to reduce cost tenfold and increase speed by about tenfold and our methods development is on track to accomplish this aim.