A recent paper reported multiple oncogenic point mutations in nave human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) and implicated selective culture conditions. However, we observed that those polymorphisms are only found when nave hPSCs are co-cultured with mouse feeder cells.  Inspection of the reads containing the reported mutations revealed that they are identical to mouse sequences. Filtering the data sets to remove reads contributed by mouse feeder cells reveals that the actual incidence of cancer-related polymorphisms is close to zero. Therefore, culture conditions for nave hPSCs do not select for tumorigenic point mutations. SOURCE: Giuliano,Giuseppe,Stirparo (giulianostirparo@gmail.com) -  University of Cambridge

Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE150933: Cancer-Related Mutations are Not Enriched in Nave Human Pluripotent Stem Cells