Induction of ESSC Proliferation and Differentiation

E18 ESSCs were cultured using the NeuroCult NS-A Proliferation Kit and NeuroCult NS-A Differentiation Kit (rat) from Stem Cell Technologies, for the induction of proliferation and differentiation, respectively. The growth factor supplements consisting of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1, Sigma I 8779), leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF, Sigma L 5158), epidermal growth factor (EGF, Sigma E 4127) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF, Sigma F 0291) were purchased from Sigma. The concentrations of these growth factors used were 20 ng/mL for the EGF and bFGF, 100 ng/mL for the IGF-1 and 20 ng/mL for the LIF, in accordance with our recently published report [7 (link)]. The ESSCs were plated in T-25 culture flasks (BD Falcon) in triplicate, under five different conditions (Figure 1): group A (no growth factor); group B (EGF + bFGF); group C (EGF + bFGF + LIF); group D (EGF + bFGF + IGF-1); and group E (EGF + bFGF + LIF + IGF-1).