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 ...

introduction: embryonic stem (es) cells are pluripotent cells derived from the inner cell mass of blastocysts. these cells are appropriate for creation of animal models of human genetic diseases, the study of gene functions in vivo and differentiation into specific types as potential therapeutic agents for several diseases. we describe here production of transgenic chimeric mouse blastocysts by...

It has been one year since Brazil passed a law enabling scientists to work with human embryonic stem cells and to derive new stem cell lines from human embryos. But several major hurdles have put human embryonic stem cell research on hold.

Human embryonic stem cells have unique value for regenerative medicine, as they are capable of differentiating into a broad variety of cell types. Therefore, defining the signalling pathways that control early cell fate decisions of pluripotent stem cells represents a major task. Moreover, modelling the early steps of embryonic development in vitro may provide the best approach to produce cell ...

background: since embryonic stem (es) cells have the dual ability to proliferate indefinitely and differentiate into multiple tissue types, es cells could potentially provide an unlimited cell supply for human transplantation. objective: in order to study the differentiation of mouse embryonic stem (mes) cells, they were cultured in suspension by using es media without leukemia inhibitory facto...

RESEARCH QUESTIONS Couples undergoing IVF in Switzerland may have embryos in excess of their clinical need that they can donate to human embryonic stem cell research. Thus a new practice has emerged in Switzerland when IVF treatment and embryonic stem cell research come into contact. This interface needs to be investigated from an ethical-legal point of view to facilitate a fair informed choice...

I Declaration IV Acknowledgements V List of Figures VIII List of Tables XVII List of Abbreviations XX Chapter 1: General Introduction 1 1.1 Human Embryonic Stem Cells 2 1.1.1 Derivation of Human Embryonic Stem Cells 2 1.1.2 Culture of Human Embryonic Stem Cells 4 1.1.3 Characterization of Human Embryonic Stem Cells 5 1.1.4 Applications of Human Embryonic Stem Cells 6 1.2 Embryonic Stem Cell Plu...

abstract introduction: cancer stem cells are a small subpopulation of cells within a tumor which are responsible for maintaining the tumor mass. a number of factors such as oct-4 that govern the fate of adult stem cells also play a role in malignant cell transformation. oct-4 is a key regulator of self-renewal in embryonic stem cells; its expression is potentially correlated with tumorigenesis ...