Following embryonic stem cells, their differentiated progeny, and cell-state changes during iPS reprogramming by Raman spectroscopy

To monitor cell state transition in pluripotent cells is invaluable for application and basic research. In this study, we demonstrate the pertinence of use non-invasive, label-free Raman spectroscopy to monitor and characterize the cell state transition of mouse stem cells undergoing reprogramming. Using an isogenic cell line of mouse stem cells, reprogramming from neuronal cells was performed, and we showcase a comparative analysis of single cell spectral data of the original stem cells, their neuronal progenitors, and reprogrammed cells. Neural network, regression models, and ratiometric analysis were used to discriminate the cell states and extract several important biomarkers specific to differentiation or reprogramming. Our results indicated that the Raman spectrum allowed to build a low dimensional space allowing to monitor and characterize the dynamics of cell state transition at a single cell level, scattered in heterogeneous populations. Ability of monitoring pluripotency by Raman spectroscopy, and distinguish differences between ES and reprogrammed cells is also discussed.