Eye and head movements are coordinated during head-free pursuit. To examine whether pursuit neurons in frontal eye fields (FEF) carry gaze-pursuit commands that drive both eye-pursuit and head-pursuit, monkeys whose heads were free to rotate about a vertical axis were trained to pursue a juice feeder with their head and a target with their eyes. Initially the feeder and target moved synchronous...

Single-cell mRNA sequencing (RNA-seq) methods have undergone rapid development in recent years, and transcriptome analysis of relevant cell populations at single-cell resolution has become a key research area of biomedical sciences. We here present single-cell mRNA 3-prime end sequencing (SC3-seq), a practical methodology based on PCR amplification followed by 3-prime-end enrichment for highly ...

Embryonic stem (ES) cells can differentiate into many cell types and are expected to be useful for tissue engineering. Recent reports have shown that ES cells can differentiate into insulin-producing cells in response to the transient expression of the pdx-1 gene, after the removal of feeder cells. To investigate the lineage of insulin-producing cells and their in vitro differentiation, we intr...

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has been used for transplantation in the treatment of hematologic disorders as a source of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Because of insufficient number of cord blood CD34+ cells, the expansion of these cells seems to be important for clinical application. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), playing an important role in HSCs maintenance, were used as feeder layer. Apo...

Human embryonic stem cells (HESCs) are pluripotent cells derived from the ICM of blastocyst stage embryos. As the factors needed for their growth are largely undefined, they are propagated on feeder cells or with conditioned media from feeder cells. This is in contrast to mouse embryonic stem cells (MESCs) where addition of leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) replaces the need for a feeder layer. ...

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are pluripotent cells that have indefinite replicative potential and the ability to differentiate into derivatives of all three germ layers. hESCs are conventionally grown on mitotically inactivated mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) or feeder cells of human origin. In addition, feeder-free culture systems can be used to support hESCs, in which the adhesive su...

In guiding hES cell technology toward the clinic, one key issue to be addressed is to culture and maintain hES cells much more safely and economically in large scale. In order to avoid using mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) we isolated human fetal liver stromal cells (hFLSCs) from 14 weeks human fetal liver as new human feeder cells. hFLSCs feeders could maintain hES cells for 15 passages (ab...