Screening of pure synthetic coating substrates for induced pluripotent stem cells and iPSC-derived neuroepithelial progenitors with short peptide based integrin array.

Simple and pure synthetic coating substrates are needed to overcome the disadvantages of traditional coating products like animal derived Matrigel in stem cell research. Since integrins are of great importance in cell adhesion and cell-ECM communication, in this study, a commercially available integrin array established by synthetic integrin binding peptides is used to screen coating substrates for iPSCs and NEPs. The results showed that binding peptides of integrin α5β1, αVβ1, αMβ2 and αIIbβ3 supported cell adhesion of iPSCs, while α5β1, αVβ1 and αIIbβ3 binding peptides supported NEPs adhesion. Additionally, integrin α5β1 binding peptide was revealed to support rapid expansion of iPSCs and iPSC-derived NEPs, as well as the process of NEPs generation, with equal efficiency as Matrigel. In this work, we demonstrated that by supporting stem cell growth in an integrin dependent manner, the integrin array and coating system has the potential to develop more precise and efficient systems in neurological disease modeling.