Neural induction with a dopaminergic phenotype from human pluripotent stem cells through a feeder-free floating aggregation culture.

Pluripotent stem cells are promising potential sources for cell replacement therapy and are useful research tools for exploring disease mechanisms. Neural cells are one of the cell types that have been most efficiently differentiated through several established protocols. This chapter describes the feeder-free floating aggregation culture system for the induction of dopaminergic neurons. This method is simple and highly efficient for the production of dopaminergic neurons. It has several advantages for application in clinical usage in comparison to the other protocols using either feeder cells or Matrigel.