For the first time: reprogramming of somatic cells without intermediate stages
German researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Medicine, working under the leadership of Hans Schöler, for the first time managed to obtain somatic cells from fully differentiated somatic cells, bypassing the pluripotency stage. To do this, they isolated mouse skin cells and affected them with a unique combination of growth factors while observing specific cultivation conditions.
Until now, induced pluripotent cells (iPSCs) obtained from fully differentiated somatic cells have been considered the most limiting possibilities of cell biology. Under certain conditions, these cells are able to differentiate into all types of cells in the body, but their pluripotency is associated with a certain instability of the genome and an increased probability of tumor degeneration, which has become an obstacle on their way to clinical practice. The cells obtained by the authors offer a solution to this dilemma: they are multipotent, that is, they can give rise only to certain types of cells, in this case, cells that form nerve tissue.
According to Scheler, the key component of the growth factor cocktail used by his group was the Brn4 protein, which had never been used in studies of this kind before. He claims that, if the developed protocol is followed, skin cells gradually lose their molecular memory of their origin and after just a few cell cycles turn into nervous somatic stem cells, practically indistinguishable from ordinary stem cells that make up the nervous tissue.
The resulting neural stem cells are labeled specific to them
immunofluorescent markers: SSEA1 (red) and Olig2 (green).
Multipotency of these cells significantly reduces the risk of tumor formation in the recipient's body compared to the risk associated with transplantation of pluripotent stem cells. Researchers believe that in the foreseeable future they can be used to repair tissues damaged as a result of injuries, diseases and aging of the body. However, there is still a lot of work to be done before that, the next stage of which will be the reproduction of the results obtained on human cells.
Article by Dong Wook Han et al. Direct Reprogramming of Fibroblasts into Neural Stem Cells by Defined Factors is published in the preliminary on-line version of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: Somatic stem cells obtained from skin cells for the first time ever.
26.03.2012