Can you speak to the advantages and challenges of using blood cells to generate iPSCs versus other cell types?

Answer

A couple of advantages of using blood cells as a source for generating iPSCs include the ease of obtaining blood samples from donors, and the higher reprogramming efficiency of blood cells compared to other cell types.

One of the challenges of using blood cells is determining which blood cell type to start with for iPSC generation and isolating/enriching for that population. This decision may be dependent on the amount of blood that you receive from the donor. If you use a heterogeneous population of mononuclear cells, you may generate iPSCs from progenitors as well as more mature cell types (e.g. T- and B-cells), the latter of which can give rise to can give rise iPSCs with genomic rearrangements. This is why we recommend using our Blood Reprogramming Kits for Erythroid Progenitor or CD34+ Progenitor Cells, as they include reagents to deplete T- and B-cells and enrich for only the desired starting cell type.