Bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signalling contributes towards maintenance of pluripotency and favours mesodermal over neural fates upon differentiation, but the mechanisms by which BMP controls differentiation are not well understood. We report that BMP regulates differentiation by blocking downregulation of Cdh1, an event that accompanies the earliest stages of neural and mesodermal differenti...

MECP2 protein binds preferentially to methylated CpGs and regulates gene expression by causing changes in chromatin structure. The mechanism by which impaired MECP2 activity can induce pathological abnormalities in the nervous system of patients with Rett syndrome (RTT) is not clearly understood. To gain further insight into the role of MECP2 in human neurogenesis, we compared the neural differ...

Background and Objective: In neurodegenerative disorders, oxidative stress mediated by reactive oxygen species is strongly associated with increased neuronal damages that lead to apoptosis. Pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic gene expressions were changed during cell differentiation that affect cell viability and differentiation. This study was conducted to determine the effects of hydrogen peroxi...

Introduction: Precise temporal control of cell differentiation is essential for craniofacial development. Disruptions to this process result in a range of human birth defects. For example, premature cell differentiation within the osteogenic front of cranial sutures causes craniosynostoses. Conversely, a delay in differentiation of median edge epithelium leads to clefting of the secondary palat...

Postnatal neural progenitor cells of the enteric nervous system are a potential source for future cell replacement therapies of developmental dysplasia like Hirschsprung's disease. However, little is known about the molecular mechanisms driving the homeostasis and differentiation of this cell pool. In this work, we conducted Affymetrix GeneChip experiments to identify differences in gene regula...

During neural crest development in avian embryos, transcription factor N-myc is initially expressed in the entire cell population. The expression is then turned off in the period following colonization in ganglion and nerve cord areas except for the cells undergoing neuronal differentiation. This was also recapitulated in the culture of Japanese quail neural crest, and the cells expressing N-my...

Background and Aims:In neurodegenerative disorders,oxidative stress mediated by reactive oxygen species is strongly associated with increased neuronal damages which can lead to apoptosis. Pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic gene expressions are changed during the cell differentiation that affect cell viability and differentiation. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the effects of hyd...

Neural differentiation in amphibian embryos is initiated by the neural inducers emanating from the Spemann-Mangold organizer. The fate of uncommitted ectoderm is determined by graded BMP activity along the dorsal-ventral axis. Several transcriptional regulators acting in early neural differentiation have been identified, including Sox, Zic, Pou, HLH and Fox factors. In this paper, I review rece...

In this study, the behavior of neural stem cells from the newborn rat spinal cord was compared at neurosphere level after the addition of neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) once or daily, blank chitosan carriers, or NT-3-chitosan carriers respectively. We found that NT-3 enhanced the viability and differentiation of neural stem cells, but as NT-3 has an extremely short half-life at 37 degrees C, in order to...