al., 2014). Although directed-differentiation protocols are thought to more closely mimic in vivo development, the protracted timeline poses a major disadvantage. Viral-based induction strategies have been utilized to overexpress exogenous transcription factors to produce excitatory (Ho et al., 2016) and cortical inhibitory neurons (Colasante et al., 2015); however, these strategies carry the caveat of additional artificiality and may fail to affect all of the transcription factors necessary to induce regional specificity (see Chanda et al., 2013 and Pak et al., 2015 for evidence on same phenotype across different cell culture methods).
