Posters

The authors present a result of survey among 300 residents of the Russian Far East on their potential willingness to store cord blood stem cells of their newborns and/or their own gametes for the future needs. The current status of the cord blood banking system in Russia is also described.

The EU chemical policy REACH, effective on June 2007, regulates the registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals. Investigations on the effects of neurotoxic and developmental-neurotoxic substances are required by European and US-American test guidelines. However, at the moment these tests are based on animal experiments contradicting society claims to abolish animal experiments and to implement the 3R-principle. The resulting problem is… How to pair REACH and the 3Rs?

The cDNA libraries from single oocytes and pre-implantation buffalo embryos from 2 cell stage to blastocyst were established. Relative expression studied with RT-PCR of IGF-I showed an increase at 12h and decline at 24h of IVM oocytes. IGF-IR was expressed at cleavage stages to blastocyts. Glut-I was expressed in IVM oocytes and SCNT embryos at all stages. Gene expression of IGF-I, IGF-IR and Glut-I plays an important role in SCNT embryo production.

Cell chips are developed to continuously monitor mammalian cell population dynamics in a non-invasive manner. In the presented work we describe the design, fabrication and characterization of a lab-on-a-chip for quantitative cell analysis.

Image-based high-content screening assays, demand solutions for image segmentation and cellular compartment encoding to track critical events – for example those presented by GFPreporters within cell cycle tracking and GPCR translocation assays. We have designed nuclear and cytoplasm discriminator CyTRAK™ probes - spectrally compatible with all variants of GFPreporters offering new solutions in cytometry.

New technologies are needed to deal with live cell-based HCS assays on non-adherent cells or to exploit suspension cells in fluidic systems. Here we describe CyGEL™ - a thermo-reversible hydrogelbased 4-D immobilization technology for live cell location without imposing an anchoring to a substrate.

We demonstrate that DNA methylation patterns can serve as characteristic markers to distinguish different cell types. We have identified panels of methylation markers that are specific to mesenchymal stem cells or various differentiated cell types in the mesenchymal lineage. This method of cell type identification has a number of advantages over conventional markers in that it is robust, is both qualitative and quantitative.

Market pressure exists for new paradigms to meet the demands for more rapid and reproducible cell production to keep up with advances in cell-based assays used in drug discovery and development. Novel automation platforms enable high productivity on three dimensional surfaces.

The work presented in this poster covers the investigation of key parameters for the expansion of stem cells in an automated micro-well format. The effect of inoculation seeding density (ICD), well size, passage number and feeding strategies on the proliferation of human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSC) was investigated. In parallel the effect of well size and seeding density on the proliferation of mouse embryonic stem (mES) cells was also examined.