Embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells, the stem cells of teratocarcinomas, are the malignant counterparts of pluripotent embryonic stem (ES) cells, but commonly exhibit a reduced ability to differentiate, presumably because of continual selection for genetic changes that alter the balance between self-renewal, differentiation and apoptosis in favour of self-renewal. To explore the nature of the geneti...

Nogo is a novel myelin-associated inhibitor of neurite outgrowth which regulates stable neuronal connections during axonal regeneration following injury in the adult mammalian central nervous system (CNS). Because cytokines and neurotrophic factors play a key role in inflammation-related axonal regeneration, we investigated: (i) the constitutive expression of Nogo and the Nogo receptor (NgR) mR...

Tripartite motif 44 (TRIM44) is one of the TRIM family proteins that are involved in ubiquitination and degradation of target proteins by modulating E3 ubiquitin ligases. TRIM44 overexpression has been observed in various cancers. However, its association with testicular germ cell tumor (TGCT) is unknown. We aimed to investigate the clinical significance of TRIM44 and its function in TGCT. High...

Human embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells typically require high cell densities to maintain their characteristic phenotype; they are generally subject to differentiation when cultured at low cell densities, marked by changes in morphology and expression of the surface antigen, SSEA-1. To test whether cadherin mediated cell-to-cell adhesion may be responsible for maintaining an EC phenotype we ascert...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been recognized as key players in transcriptional regulation. We show that the lncRNA steroid receptor RNA activator (SRA) participates in regulation through complex formation with trithorax group (TrxG) and polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) complexes. Binding of the SRA-associated RNA helicase p68 preferentially stabilizes complex formation between SRA an...

UNLABELLED Triggers and regulatory pathways that effectively link human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) major immediate early (MIE) latent-lytic switch activation with progeny production are incompletely understood. In the quiescently infected human NTera2 cell model of primitive neural stem cells, we found that costimulation with vasoactive intestinal peptide (V) and phorbol ester (P) synergistically a...

Reverse transcription-PCR and Northern and Western blot analyses indicate that mRNA and protein encoded by the Brachyury gene are expressed by the pluripotent human embryonal carcinoma cell line NTERA2 and are only modestly down-regulated during retinoic acid-induced differentiation. This differentiation occurs along a neural lineage, with no obvious evidence of the formation of mesodermal deri...

Pluripotential human embryonal carcinoma (EC) cell linesundergo differentiation programs resembling those occurring in embryonal stem cells during development. Expression profiling was performed during the terminal differentiation of the EC cell line, NTera2/Clone D1 by all-trans-retinoic acid. Time-response analysis via clustering of >12,000 human transcripts revealed distinct stages in the tr...