The NIH Center for Regenerative Medicine

Neural Stem Cell (NSC)

Differentiating Neural Stem Cells into Neurons

View PDF version

Title

Differentiating Neural Stem Cells into Neurons

Date Submitted

May 5, 2012

Submitted by -

Efthymiou, Anastasia - anastasia.efthymiou@nih.gov

Adapted from -

Gibco Protocol

Contributors -

Efthymiou, Anastasia

Affiliation(s) -

NIH CRM - NIAMS – Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology

Introduction:

Flowchart of Differentiating Neural Stem Cells into Neurons

Image of Human iPSC-derived neuronal culture: Neurons/Tuj1 (Green); Glia/GFAP (Red) Nuclei/DAPI (Blue)
Human iPSC-derived neuronal culture: Neurons/Tuj1 (Green); Glia/GFAP (Red) Nuclei/DAPI (Blue) - Rakesh Karmacharya, MD, PhD (Broad/McLean) from Harvard Stem Cell Institute

Protocol:

Neural stem cells (NSCs) will proliferate as progenitors a few times even after the complete growth medium is replaced with the appropriate differentiation medium. If the cells reach 90% confluency, it might be necessary to split the cells at a 1:2 ratio. However, do not split the cells once they reach day 9-10 of differentiation when they can get damaged during the passaging process.

  1. Plate neural stem cells on a polyornithine and laminin - coated culture dish in complete StemPro NSC SFM at 2.5 × 10^4 or 5 × 10^4 cells/cm2.
  2. After 2 days, change the medium to neural differentiation medium. Change the spent medium every 3 to 4 days.
  3. If expedited differentiation is desired, add 0.5 mM of dibutyryl cAMP (Sigma, Cat. no. D0627) to the differentiation medium daily starting at day 7 of differentiation for 3 days.

IMPORTANT! Do not expose cells to air at any time after they have differentiated into neurons.

Materials:

polyornithine and laminin-coated culture dish

complete StemPro NSC SFM medium

neural differentiation medium

dibutyryl cAMP

StemPro NSC SFM Complete Media

Component

Final concentration

Amount

KnockOutTM D-MEM/F-12

1X

97 mL

GlutaMAXTM-I Supplement

2 mM

1 mL

bFGF (prep as 100 µg/mL stock)

20 ng/mL

20 μL

EGF (prep as 100 µg/mL stock)

20 ng/mL

20 μL

StemPro® Neural Supplement

2%

2 mL

Neural Differentiation Medium

Component

Final concentration

Amount

Neurobasal® Medium 1X 97 mL
B-27® Serum-Free Supplement 2% 12 mL
GlutaMAXTM-I Supplement 2 mM 1 mL

Troubleshooting:

References:

This page was last modified on October 18, 2012