Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are promising cell sources for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Scaffolds for ESC-based tissue regeneration should provide not only structural support, but also signals capable of supporting appropriate cell differentiation and tissue development. Extracellular matrix (ECM) is a key component of the stem cell niche in vivo and can influence stem cell fat...

Embryonic stem cells (ESC) are self-renewing and can generate all cell types during normal development. Previous studies have begun to explore fates of ESCs and their mesodermal derivatives after injection into explanted intact metanephric kidneys and neonatal kidneys maturing in vivo. Here, we exploited a recently described recombinant organ culture model, mixing fluorescent quantum dot labele...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a central role in the regulation of multiple biological processes including the maintenance of stem cell self-renewal and pluripotency. Recently, the miRNA cluster miR302-367 was shown to be differentially expressed in embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Unfortunately, very little is known about the genomic structure of miRNA-encoding genes and their transcriptional units. Here...

Embryonic stem cells (ESC) are pluripotent cells capable to give rise to any embryonic cell lineage. In culture, these cells form colonies creating their own niche. Depending upon the molecular and physico-chemical environment, the pluripotent cells oscillate between two metastable states of pluripotency either reminiscent of the inner cell mass of the embryo or the epiblast, a stage of develop...

BACKGROUND Embryonic stem cells (ESC) maintain their 'stemness' by self-renewal. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying self-renewal of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) remain to be elucidated. In this study, expression profiles of the molecules of developmentally important signalling pathways were investigated to better understand the relationships of the signalling pathways for self-re...

Maintaining genomic integrity during DNA replication is essential for stem cells. DNA replication origins are licensed by the MCM2-7 complexes, with most of them remaining dormant. Dormant origins (DOs) rescue replication fork stalling in S phase and ensure genome integrity. However, it is not known whether DOs exist and play important roles in any stem cell type. Here, we show that embryonic s...

The concept of pluripotency as a prerogative of cells of early mammal embryos and cultured embryonic stem cells (ESC) has been invalidated with the advent of induced pluripotent stem cells. Later, it became clear that the ability to generate all cell types of the adult organism is also a questionable aspect of pluripotency, as there are cell types, such as germ cells, which are difficult to pro...

Stem cells mainly include embryonic stem cells (ESC), pluripotent stem cells (iPS), Epiblast-derived stem cells (Epi-SC), and adult tissue stem cells. ESC are pluripotent, being able to differentiate into the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm (Evans and Kaufman, 1981; Martin, 1981). However, there are ethical issues when using human embryos, and ESC transplants into mouse models can result in mal...

The inconsistency of efficiency in murine embryonic stem cell (ESC) production might be associated with the differences in preparation and cryopreservation of the feeder cell layer. As the cryopreservation of mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) declined the quality of MEF as feeder cell layer, an effective protocol should be determined to produce murine ESC on frozen-thawed feeder cell layer as ef...

RNA interference (RNAi) screens have been shown to be valuable to study embryonic stem cell (ESC) self-renewal and they have been successfully applied to identify coding as well as noncoding genes required for maintaining pluripotency. Here, we used an RNAi library targeting >640 long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA) to probe for their role in early cell differentiation. Utilizing a Sox1-GFP ESC reporte...