This study compares the ultrastructure of murine embryonal carcinoma cells, the multipotential stem cells of teratocarcinomas, with the constituents of the primordial testicular tubules in which they arise. The primordial tubules were composed of Sertoli cells and primordial germinal cells ; the former were well differentiated with Golgi membranes and well developed cisternal endoplasmic reticu...

The pluripotent potential of embryonic stem cells has often seen them touted as the future of regenerative medicine. The road to any therapeutic success however, must stretch back to teratocarcinoma, the tumour from which pluripotent stem cells (embryonal carcinoma cells) were first derived. This 2011 meeting in Cardiff acted as a historical perspective from which the impact of embryonal carcin...

We have identified a novel mouse Wnt genc using a cDNA differential screening procedure for retinoic-acid-induced transcripts in P19 embryonal carcinoma cells. Sequence analysis showed that this gene represents the first murine Wnt-8 (mWnt-8) gene reported to date. The expression of the mWnt-8 gene, which is rapidly induced by retinoic acid in P19 and embryonic stem cells, appears to be restric...

In order to identify novel pluripotency-related oncogenes, an expression screen for oncogenic foci-inducing genes within a retroviral human embryonic stem cell cDNA library was conducted. From this screen, we identified not only known oncogenes but also intriguingly the key pluripotency factor, DPPA4 (developmental pluripotency-associated four) that encodes a DNA binding SAP domain-containing p...

The retinoblastoma (RB) protein is present at low levels in early mouse embryos and in pluripotent P19 embryonal carcinoma cells; however, the levels of RB rise dramatically in neuroectoderm formed both in embryos and in differentiating cultures of P19 cells. To investigate the effect of inactivating RB and related proteins p107 and p130, we transfected P19 cells with genes encoding mutated ver...

MASH1 and MASH2, mammalian homologues of the Drosophila neural determination genes achaete-scute, are members of the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) family of transcription factors. We show here that murine P19 embryonal carcinoma cells can be used as a model system to study the regulation and function of these genes. MASH1 and MASH2 display complementary patterns of expression during the retinoi...

Glutamate behaves as the principal excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate central nervous system and recently demonstrates intercellular signaling activities in periphery cancer cells. How the glutamatergic transmission is organized and operated in cancer stem cells remains undefined. We have identified a glutamatergic transmission circuit in embryonal carcinoma stem cells. The circuit i...

Just over ten years have passed since the seminal Takahashi-Yamanaka paper, and while most attention nowadays is on induced, embryonic, and cancer stem cells, much of the pioneering work arose from studies with embryonal carcinoma cells (ECCs) derived from teratocarcinomas. This original work was broad in scope, but eventually led the way for us to focus on the components involved in the gene r...