objective: endothelial progenitor cells (epcs) have a potential application for cell therapy, however, their biological nature is not well-understood. epcs also possess some stemness features, such as their clonogenicity and differentiation capacity. the main aim of this study was to evaluate the expression of certain transcription factors regulating self-renewal property of stem cells. materia...

Oct4 and Sox2 regulate the expression of target genes such as Nanog, Fgf4, and Utf1, by binding to their respective regulatory motifs. Their functional cooperation is reflected in their ability to heterodimerize on adjacent cis regulatory motifs, the composite Sox/Oct motif. Given that Oct4 and Sox2 regulate many developmental genes, a quantitative analysis of their synergistic action on differ...

The presence of acetylated histone H3K56 (H3K56ac) in human ES cells (ESCs) correlates positively with the binding of Nanog, Sox2, and Oct4 (NSO) transcription factors at their target gene promoters. However, the function of H3K56ac there has been unclear. We now report that Oct4 interacts with H3K56ac in mouse ESC nuclear extracts and that perturbing H3K56 acetylation decreases Oct4-H3 binding...

Background Recent researches reveal that manual puncturing of the trophectoderm of blastocyst before vitrification, increase the quality of embryo. However, in any of these studies, the importance of blastocoelic fluid and its impact on the formation of three cell lines is not mentioned. Therefore, in the present study, the effect of blastocoelic fluid reduction before vitrification on survival...

The involvement of stemness factors in cancer initiation and progression has drawn much attention recently, especially after the finding that introducing four stemness factors in somatic cells is able to reprogram the cells back to an embryonic stem cell-like state. Following accumulating data revealing abnormal elevated expression levels of key stemness factors, like Nanog, Oct4, and Sox2, in ...

The neural induction constitutes the initial step in generation of tube. Pcgf1, as one six Pcgf paralogs, is a maternally expressed gene, but its role and mechanism early during tube development have not yet been explored. In this study, we found that zebrafish embryos exhibited small head reduced or even absence telencephalon after inhibiting expression Pcgf1. Moreover, process was abnormally ...

Stem cell research can lead to the development of treatments for a wide range of ailments including diabetes, heart disease, aging, neurodegenerative diseases, spinal cord injury, and cancer. OCT4 is a master regulator of self-renewal of undifferentiated embryonic stem cells. OCT4 also plays a crucial role in reprogramming of somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Given known ...

Neuroblastoma is a pediatric solid tumor that originates from embryonic neural crest cells. The MYCN gene locus is frequently amplified in unfavorable neuroblastomas, and the gene product promotes the progression of neuroblastomas. However, the molecular mechanisms by which MYCN amplification contributes to stem cell-like states of neuroblastoma remain elusive. In this study, we show that MYCN ...