The engrailed gene has been identified in Drosophila as an important developmental gene involved in the control of segmentation. Here we describe the embryonic expression of a chicken gene, ChickEn (Darnell et al.: J Cell Biol 103(5):311a, 1986), which contains homology to the Drosophila engrailed gene. Northern blots of early chick embryo tissue poly(A)+ RNA resulted in hybridization to at lea...

embryonic stem cells (escs) are pluripotent, self-renewing cells. these cells can be used in applications such as cell therapy, drug discovery, disease modelling, and the study of cellular differentiation. in this experimental study embryonic stem cells cultured in the laboratory and were amplified. total rna was extracted from cells and converted to cdna by reverse transcription-polymerase cha...

Cell lineages generated during development and tissue maintenance are derived from self-renewing stem cells by differentiation of their committed progeny. Recent studies suggest that epigenetic mechanisms, and in particular the Polycomb group (PcG) of genes, play important roles in controlling stem cell self-renewal. Here, we address PcG regulation of stem cell self-renewal and differentiation ...

Kit receptor tyrosine kinase is highly expressed in the developing mammalian brain, yet little is known about its contribution to neural cell development and function. Here we introduced a brain-specific conditional Kit loss-of-function mutation in mice and observed severe hypoplasia of the central nervous system. This was accompanied by an increase in apoptotic cell death in the early embryoni...

spinal cord injury (sci) is a destructive condition that the cord can't send signals below the level of the injury. despite advances in the medical and surgical care of sci patients, no effective treatment exists for the neurological deficits of sci. cell therapy is a new approach for sci, and preclinical models demonstrate that cell transplantation can improve some secondary events throug...

Background  The mammary gland in humans is a dynamic organ that undergoes significant developmental changes during pregnancy, lactation, and involution. Stem cells derived from human breast milk possess the adult stem cell-like characteristics such as self-renewal, proliferative and differentiate potential. This source of stem cells avoids invasive procedures and the ethical controversy of emb...

BACKGROUND The A10 and A7r5 cell lines derived from the thoracic aorta of embryonic rat are widely used as models of non-differentiated, neonatal and neointimal vascular smooth muscle cells in culture. The recent discovery of resident multipotent vascular stem cells within the vessel wall has necessitated the identity and origin of these vascular cells be revisited. In this context, we examined...

An epithelial-mesenchymal cell transformation occurs during the development of the endocardial cushions in the atrioventricular (AV) canal of the heart. We hypothesized that the transcription factor Slug is required for this epithelial-mesenchymal cell transformation since Slug is required for similar transformations during gastrulation and neural crest differentiation in chicken embryos. We fo...

Human neuroblastoma I-type cells isolated from cell lines in vitro are morphologically intermediate between neuroblastic (N) cells, with properties of embryonic sympathoblasts, and substrate-adherent (S) cells having properties of embryonic Schwann/glial/melanocytic cells of the neural crest. I cells have biochemical features of both N and S cells. We propose that the I-type cell represents a m...

stem cells are the cells having some distinguishing characteristics like longevity, high capacity of self-renewal and differentiation, quiescence and highly error-free proliferation. almost all stem cells have the potential of lineage reprogramming, i.e. inter-conversion of cell lineages. they also have the potential to differentiate into almost all kinds of cells. these cells have been found i...