Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), including human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), are capable of differentiating into any cell type in the human body and thus can be used in studies of early human development, as cell models for different diseases and eventually also in regenerative medicine applications. Since the first derivation of hESCs in...

Leukemia inhibitory factor and bone morphogenetic protein signaling pathways play important roles in maintaining the self-renewal of mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs). In contrast, the supplementation of fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) in culture promotes mouse ESC differentiation. It has been proposed that factors that are adverse for maintaining the self-renewal of ESCs might play detriment...

Forced expression of certain transcription factors in somatic cells results in generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which differentiate into various cell types. We investigated T-cell and B-cell lineage differentiation from iPS cells in vitro. To evaluate the impact of iPS cell source, murine splenic B-cell-derived iPS (B-iPS) cells were generated after retroviral transduction of...

backgrounds: a straight-forward way to identify whether a drug or environmental chemical can be harmful to unborn baby is to evaluate its effect on laboratory animals. all invivo methods need large number of animal and are therefore time consuming and expensive. however, the thousands of chemicals in need of testing, to reduce the spending of live animals, an assortment of in vitro assays has b...

Background Huntington’s disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that presents with motor and cognitive deficits psychiatric disturbances. HD associated autosomal dominant inheritance of CAG trinucleotide repeat expansion mutation in the huntingtin (HTT) gene. The protein localizes to spindle poles required for proper mitotic orientation, chromosome segregation, cell cycle regul...

Lungs develop from paired endodermal outgrowths surrounded by a mesodermal mesenchyme. Part of this mesenchyme arises from epithelial-mesenchymal transition of the mesothelium that lines the pulmonary buds. Previous studies have shown that this mesothelium-derived mesenchyme contributes to the smooth muscle of the pulmonary vessels, but its significance for lung morphogenesis and its developmen...

In multiple sclerosis Oligodendrocytes are obliterated by the immune system. neural stem/ progenitor cells (NS/P Cs) have the capacity to differentiate into mature myelinating oligodendrocytes. In embryonic mouse cortex oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) are more abundant than the ganglionic eminence. Doing gene set enrichment analysis using DAVID and Panther websites it was shown that Gpr...

The reprogramming of fibroblasts to pluripotent stem cells and the direct conversion of fibroblasts to functional neurons has been successfully manipulated by ectopic expression of defined factors. We demonstrate that mouse fibroblasts can be converted into sphere cells by detaching the fibroblast cells by protease and then using the AlbuMAX I-containing culture medium without genetic alteratio...