Introduction

Embryonic stem cells (ES cells) derived from ICM can self-renew and are pluripotent, meaning they can be made to differentiate into cell types representative of the three embryonic germ layers, ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm when challenged with appropriate exogenous compounds. However, to clearly understand these properties and to be able to exploit them in regenerative medicine, there is a need to identify pluripotency-controlling genes and to elucidate potential signaling pathways essential for the maintainance of pluripotency, self-renewal and the directed differentiation into desired donor cells for transplantational therapies.

To this end we previously described the molecular portraits of ICM and TE isolated from human blastocysts. (Adjaye et. al, 2005 [1]). Furthermore, we have now identified a set of genes specific to pluripotent ICM, ESC, PGCs and to totipotent unfertilised oocytes and preimplantation embryos. The focus our research now is to determine the role played by these genes in stem cell biology.

This dataset consists of results generated from ablating OCT4 function in the human ES line H1 by employing RNAi coupled to expression profiling at 24 hours and 72 hours post transfection.