Neuronal Differentiation of Embryonic Carcinoma Cells

Embryonic Carcinoma cells (EC) are malignant germ cell tumor that occurs most often in the testes.EC cells serves as a model for studying embryonic development in humans.These cells are pluripotent teratocarcinomas that are derived from transformed germ cells.EC cells are stem cells of such tumors and are generally considered to be the malignant counterparts of ES cells.The NTERA-2 cell line is pluripotent human teratocarcinoma cell.NTERA-2 shares many characteristic with human ES cell. Also, the global expression of these cells is highly similar to undifferentiated hESC expression. NTERA-2 cell as like their human counter part on treatment with Retinoic acid gets differentiated into a mixed population of cell of neuronal lineage. The study aims at monitoring the transcript abundance of genes that have previously been implicated in neuronal differentiation, namely PAX6, NOGGIN, NEUROD and NESTIN and also tries to throw some light on potential differentiation specific candidate.