Eyes Wide Open: A Critical Review of Sphere-Formation as an Assay For Stem Cells
By Érika Pastrana, V. Silva-Vargas, F. Doetsch. Cell Stem Cell, 2011
828 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sphere-forming assays have been widely used to retrospectively identify stem cells based on their reported capacity to evaluate self-renewal and differentiation at the single cell level in vitro. The discovery of markers that allow the prospective isolation of stem cells and their progeny from their in vivo niche allows the functional properties of purified populations to be defined. We provide an historical perspective of the evolution of the neurosphere assay, and highlight limitations in the use of sphere-forming assays, in the context of neurospheres. We discuss theoretical and technical considerations of experimental design and interpretation that surround the use of this assay with any tissue.
Subfields: Developmental Neuroscience, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e9e2eb3181f127e6c536923fe67ec3dd1d91469
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In Developmental Neuroscience
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Citations in the corpus
- Spherical Cancer Models in Tumor Biology (2015, background): “As pertinently discussed by Pastrana et al. [76], the tumorosphere forming assay must be carefully interpreted.”
- MEF promotes stemness in the pathogenesis of gliomas (2012, positive): “…sphere-forming assays cannot be considered an exact readout of in vivo stem cell activity, they are useful to measure the in vitro potential of cells to exhibit stem-cell-like traits (Pastrana et al., 2011); therefore, we investigated whether MEF could influence the formation of neurospheres.”
- Phosphorylation of EZH2 activates STAT3 signaling via STAT3 methylation and promotes tumorigenicity of glioblastoma stem-like cells (2013, methodology): “…and/or CD15 (Singh et al., 2004; Son et al., 2009) were isolated from surgical specimens of GBM patients or their derivative xenograft tumors and functionally validated in assays of self-renewal and tumor propagation (Joo et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2008; Pastrana et al., 2011; Pollard et al., 2009).”