The discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has had a transforming effect on our understanding of biology and has brought an enormous promise to regenerative medicine. It has opened up a magnitude of unprecedented possibilities to study disease processes in vitro, model them in animal systems, and develop patient-specific cell-based regenerative therapies. iPSCs derived from other than the human species will be instrumental for bringing these prospects to fruition by providing preclinical models and novel treatments for veterinary medicine. In this chapter, we describe the derivation of iPSCs from equine embryonic fibroblasts using a non-viral method developed in our laboratory and originally applied to the murine and human systems (Woltjen et al., Nature 458:766-770, 2009). We will detail the procedures involved and discuss potential pitfalls as well as elaborate on possible variations and future improvements of this technique.
Keywords: Equine; Horse; Induced pluripotent stem cells; Non-viral; Reprogramming; Tetracycline-inducible transgene; iPSC; piggyBac transposon.