PURPOSE To establish a culture technique for human corneal epithelial equivalents that do not require fetal bovine serum (FBS), feeder cells, or bovine pituitary extracts and compare this system with conventional culture medium with FBS and mouse 3T3 fibroblasts. METHODS Human corneal limbal tissue from donor corneas was dissociated on denuded amniotic membranes and then cultured for 3 weeks ...

2 Cell movement is an important step in development. Two experiments were conducted to investigate cell movement control in serumand feeder-free conditions. There were two key findings. 1) The direction of cell migration was affected by the use of a ratchet-shaped micro-chamber. 2) Two proteins were needed as a coating to make the human iPS cell pattern. These findings provide useful tools for ...

BACKGROUND Differentiated cells can be reprogrammed into pluripotency by transduction of four defined transcription factors. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) are expected to be useful for regenerative medicine as well as basic research. Recently, the report showed that mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF) cells are not essential for reprogramming. However, in using fibroblasts as donor c...

STAT3 belongs to the signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) family. Activation of STAT3 via the LIF receptor/ gp130 signaling complex allows the derivation and propagation of embryonic stem (ES) cells from mouse blastocysts in the presence of feeders. Intriguingly, ES cells have not been established from some strains of mice, and not at all from rats under the LIF/feeder cond...

STAT3 belongs to the signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) family. Activation of STAT3 via the LIF receptor/ gp130 signaling complex allows the derivation and propagation of embryonic stem (ES) cells from mouse blastocysts in the presence of feeders. Intriguingly, ES cells have not been established from some strains of mice, and not at all from rats under the LIF/feeder cond...

Ectopic expression of transcription factors can reprogram somatic cells to a pluripotent state. However, most of the studies used skin fibroblasts as the starting population for reprogramming, which usually take weeks for expansion from a single biopsy. We show here that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be generated from adult human adipose stem cells (hASCs) freshly isolated from patie...

Feeder-free human embryonic stem cell (hESC) culture is associated with the presence of mesenchymal-like cells appearing at the periphery of the colonies. The aim of this study was to identify this early differentiation process. Long-term feeder-free hESC cultures using matrigel and conditioned medium from mouse and from human origin revealed that the appearance of mesenchymal-like cells was si...

Human embryonic stem (ES) cells are a potential source of cells for developmental studies and for a variety of applications in transplantation therapies and drug discovery. However, human ES cells are difficult to culture and maintain at a large scale, which is one of the most serious obstacles in human ES cell research. Culture of human ES cells on MEF cells after disassociation with accutase ...