intaining their Maxadilan Prevents Apoptosis in iPS Cells multipotent state. Cazillis et al. demonstrated that PACAP could induce the differentiation of ES cells into a neuronal phenotype. Therefore, we were interested to determine if maxadilan could produce neuronal differentiation of iPS cells. Both NESTIN and PAX6 are markers of neural progenitor cells, the neuroectoderm and neural crest stem cells. These factors may be utilized as markers of neural differentiation. In this study, PAX6 gene expression was lower in the iPS cells treated with maxadilan than in the control group, but this difference was not significant. In addition, the gene expression of NESTIN in both control iPS 
cells and the maxadilan treatment group was nearly identical. Moreover, there was not a significant difference between the control and maxadilan-treated iPS cells in the gene expression of NESTIN or PAX6 in cells derived from EBs. These data demonstrated that maxadilan could not produce neuronal differentiation of iPS cells. Although mTeSR1 medium, which contains recombinant human basic fibroblast growth factor and recombinant human transforming growth factor b, was used, a very small number of MedChemExpress Pyrroloquinolinequinone disodium salt spontaneously differentiated cells were observed 24220009 during the culture and passage of iPS cells. We observed that the number of spontaneously differentiated cells increased gradually if differentiated colonies were not removed prior to 3 passages of iPS cell culture. To understand the effect of maxadilan on the pluripotent state of iPS cells, we quantitatively compared the relative gene expression levels of Nanog, OCT4, SOX2, Rex1, UTF1 and TERT by RT-qPCR in both control iPS cells and the maxadilan treatment group. We also qualitatively examined the protein expression of Nanog, OCT4, SOX2, SSEA-4 and TRA-1-60 while quantitatively compared the protein expression levels of Nanog and OCT4 by immunofluorescence between these two groups. In addition, we used western blot analysis to examine the protein expression of Maxadilan Prevents Apoptosis in iPS Cells Nanog, OCT4 and SOX2. In this study, there were no significant differences in gene expression of Nanog, OCT4, SOX2, Rex1, UTF1 and TERT between the control group and the maxadilan-treated iPS cells. There were also no significant differences in protein expression levels of Nanog, OCT4 by immunofluorescence assay and Nanog, OCT4 and SOX2 by western blot analysis between these two groups. Pluripotency markers, Nanog, OCT4, SOX2, SSEA-4 and TRA-1-60 in maxadilan-treated iPS cells were confirmed by immunofluorescence. These results demonstrate that iPS cells may retain characteristics of undifferentiated stem cells even after maxadilan treatment. Moreover, our data showed that both of iPS cells treated with maxidalan and their nontreated counterparts had the ability to form EBs and further 8199874 differentiate. The differentiated cells from both groups expressed the important markers of three embryonic layers. Our data implied that treatment of iPS cells with maxadilan does not affect their pluripotent state and displayed a normal karyotype. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that PAC1 is present in human iPS cells. We also showed that maxadilan dramatically increased iPS cell viability and reduced the percentage of apoptotic cells after UVC irradiation. The anti-apoptotic effect of maxadilan was correlated to the downregulation of caspase-3 and caspase-9. Concomitantly, maxadilan did not affect the pluripotent state or karyotype