Characterization of Gene Expression Patterns among Artificially Developed Cancer Stem Cells Using Spherical Self-Organizing Map

We performed gene expression microarray analysis coupled with spherical self-organizing map (sSOM) for artificially developed cancer stem cells (CSCs). The CSCs were developed from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) with the conditioned media of cancer cell lines, whereas the CSCs were induced from primary cell culture of human cancer tissues with defined factors (OCT3/4, SOX2, and KLF4). These cells commonly expressed human embryonic stem cell (hESC)/hiPSC-specific genes (POU5F1, SOX2, NANOG, LIN28, and SALL4) at a level equivalent to those of control hiPSC 201B7. The sSOM with unsupervised method demonstrated that the CSCs could be divided into three groups based on their culture conditions and original cancer tissues. Furthermore, with supervised method, sSOM nominated TMED9, RNASE1, NGFR, ST3GAL1, TNS4, BTG2, SLC16A3, CD177, CES1, GDF15, STMN2, FAM20A, NPPB, CD99, MYL7, PRSS23, AHNAK, and LOC152573 genes commonly upregulating among the CSCs compared to hiPSC, suggesting the gene signature of the CSCs.