Cubating the RPE underGolestaneh et al. J Transl Med (2016) 14:Page 7 ofFig. 1 Differentiation and characterization of iPSC-RPE. a Immunostaining of the iPSC-RPE cultured on transwells for 4 weeks with ZO-1 antibody, RPE65, Occludin, and Bestrophin. Scale bar represent 100 M. b Graph illustrating RPE specific gene expressions in differentiated iPSC-RPE cell lines. c RPE specific gene expression in native RPE from which the iPSC-RPE are generated. Relative expression of each gene to GAPDH is compared to its relative expression level in control iPSC-RPEGolestaneh et al. J Transl Med (2016) 14:Page 8 ofFig. 2 Phagocytosis assay in iPSC-RPE. Phagocytosis assay on iPSC-RPE cultured on transwells for 4 weeks representing internalized FITC-conjugated POS. The reaction was quenched with Trypan blue to mask uninternalized POS. Nuclei are represented in blue by DAPi staining. Scale bar represent 100 Mincreasing concentration of H2O2 for 48 h. Cell viability assay under oxidative stress conditions revealed that the AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE show increased susceptibility to oxidative stress and present higher levels of cell death at 0.1, 0.2 and 0.4 mM of H2O2 when compared to normal RPE-iPSC-RPE under the same conditions (Fig. 3a). To test whether the AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE exhibit increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, we quantified the ROS production in AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE compared to normal iPSC-RPE in the presence of 0.4 mM of H2O2 for 0, 5, 15, 30 min and 1 h incubation. Our results shown in Fig. 3b revealed that AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE produce significantly higher levels of ROS under oxidative stress conditions as compared to normal RPE-iPSC-RPE.These observations are in accordance with the results showed by Chang et al. [16]. We also demonstrate that both AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE exhibit the disease 4-Hydroxytamoxifen biological activity relevant cellular phenotype and could be used for in vitro disease modeling in AMD. Super oxide dismutases (SODs) provide defense against ROS and plays an important role in controlling oxidative stress [45]. To investigate the involvement of ARMS2/ HTRA1 in affecting the SOD2 defense in RPE as reported by Yang et al., we measured the expression levels of superoxide dismutase 2 (SOD2) in AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE compared to normal RPEiPSC-RPE by Real-Time PCR under normal and our established chronic stress conditions by incubation of the cells for 2 h with H2O2 at 0.4 mM for 5 consecutive days. Our data showed that only the normal RPE-iPSC-RPE cells harboring either abnormal ARMS2/HTRA1 alleleGolestaneh et al. J Transl Med (2016) 14:Page 9 ofFig. 3 AMD iPSC-RPE exhibit increased susceptibility PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27532042 to oxidative stress and produce higher ROS. a Cell viability assays of AMD and control iPSC-RPE treated with increasing concentrations of H2O2 for 48 h. Higher susceptibility to oxidative stress-induced cell death under oxidative stress conditions (0.1, 0.2 and 0.4 mM H2O2) is observed in AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE (9R, 32R) and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE (005BF) as compared to normal RPE-iPSC-RPE (6R, 10R, 25R). b ROS production under stress conditions is significantly higher in AMD RPE-iPSC-RPE (9R, 32R) and AMD Skin-iPSC-RPE (005BF) as compared to normal RPE-iPSC-RPE (6R, 10R, 25R). Asterisk (*) in a and b indicates statistically significant difference between control and AMD iPSC- RPE, determined by student t test, p 0.(6R, 10R) or normal ARMS2/HTRA1 allele (25R) we.