Abstract
The human genome with all its ethnic variations contributes to differences in human development, aging, disease, repair, and response to medical treatments and is an exciting area of research and clinical study. The availability of well-characterized ethnically diverse stem cell lines is limited and has not kept pace with other advances in stem cell research. Here we derived xenofree ethnically diverse-human induced pluripotent stem cell (ED-iPSC) lines from fibroblasts obtained from individuals of African American, Hispanic-Latino, Asian, and Caucasian ethnic origin and have characterized the lines under a uniform platform for comparative analysis. Derived ED-iPSC lines are low passage number and evaluated in vivo by teratoma formation and in vitro by high throughput microarray analysis of EB formation and early differentiation for tri-lineage commitment to endoderm, ectoderm and mesoderm. These new xenofree ED-iPSC lines represent a well-characterized valuable resource with potential for use in future research in drug discovery or clinical investigations.