Dear Solutions Lab,
I’m in the second year of my PhD using iPSC-derived neurons to study a familial Alzheimer’s mutation. We have an isogenic control line, but in my last three differentiations the control neurons have shown a similar phenotype to the mutation line. Earlier experiments showed a clear difference.
I’ve checked for contamination and both lines passed our usual quality checks. My supervisor thinks I should optimise the differentiation, but I’m worried about spending months changing conditions just to recover the result we expected.
How would you work out whether this is a problem with the cells, variability in the differentiation, or evidence that the original finding isn’t as robust as we thought?
Thank you for taking a look.