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What's the reason why researchers usually use cell lines from "blast cells" (so, immature, like lymphoblastoid cells) for measuring gene expression data? Is that they are growing up, which would make their expression data higher and more significant?

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  • $\begingroup$ It's probably because those are the cells they have access too, or they're trying to figure out expression levels in some differentiated lineage. I've seen lots of expression kinetic experiments done in bacteria, yeast, and all sorts of standard mammalian cell lines. $\endgroup$
    – user560
    Commented Dec 1, 2013 at 20:19

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Some of the reasons why immature blast cells are studied:

  1. They have self renewal ability
  2. Can be differentiated to different types of cells
  3. Serve as model for studying development: this is quite pertinent to the gene expression studies. Because it is important to know what changes take place during differentiation and simply looking at the differentiated state won't explain that process.
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