Selecting Monoclonal Cell Lineages from Somatic Reprogramming Using Robotic-Based Spatial-Restricting Structured Flow

Somatic cell reprogramming generates induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which serve as a crucial source of seed cells for personalized disease modeling and treatment in regenerative medicine. However, the process of reprogramming often causes substantial lineage manipulations, thereby increasing cellular heterogeneity. As a consequence, the process of harvesting monoclonal iPSCs is labor-intensive and leads to decreased reproducibility. Here, we report the first in-house developed robotic platform that uses a pin-tip-based micro-structure to manipulate radial shear flow for automated monoclonal iPSC colony selection (~1 s) in a non-invasive and label-free manner, which includes tasks for somatic cell reprogramming culturing, medium changes; time-lapse-based high-content imaging; and iPSCs monoclonal colony detection, selection, and expansion. Throughput-wise, this automated robotic system can perform approximately 24 somatic cell reprogramming tasks within 50 days in parallel via a scheduling program. Moreover, thanks to a dual flow-based iPSC selection process, the purity of iPSCs was enhanced, while simultaneously eliminating the need for single-cell subcloning. These iPSCs generated via the dual processing robotic approach demonstrated a purity 3.7 times greater than that of the conventional manual methods. In addition, the automatically produced human iPSCs exhibited typical pluripotent transcriptional profiles, differentiation potential, and karyotypes. In conclusion, this robotic method could offer a promising solution for the automated isolation or purification of lineage-specific cells derived from iPSCs, thereby accelerating the development of personalized medicines.