Methods to Induce Small-Scale Differentiation of iPS Cells into Dopaminergic Neurons and to Detect Disease Phenotypes

Abstract

Disease-specific induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are useful tools to analyze the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. In this chapter, we describe a procedure to efficiently induce small-scale differentiation of patient iPS cells into midbrain dopaminergic neurons to detect cell death and mitochondrial clearance by using immunostaining. A combination of our method described here and an image analysis system, such as the IN Cell Analyzer, will enable the quantitative assessment of cell vulnerability and mitochondrial quality control abnormalities in cells derived from patients with Parkinson's disease; this set-up might be used to perform drug screening.

Keywords: Disease modeling; Dopaminergic neurons; Drug discovery; Parkinson’s disease; Small scale; iPS cells.