Embryonic stem cell differentiation studied by FT-IR spectroscopy

We propose, here, an FT-IR method to monitor the spontaneous differentiation of murine embryonic stem (ES) cells in their early development. Principal component analysis and subsequent linear discriminant analysis enabled us to segregate stem cell spectra into separate clusters corresponding to different differentiation times - and to identify the most significant spectral changes during differentiation. Between days 4 to 7 of differentiation, these spectral changes in the protein amide I band (1700-1600 cm(-1)) and in the nucleic acid absorption region (1050-850 cm(-1)) indicated that mRNA translation was taking place and that specific proteins were produced, reflecting the appearance of a…