Objective(s): The present day challenge is how to obtain germ cells from stem cells to treat patients with cancer and infertility. Much more efforts have been made to develop a procedure for attaining germ cells in vitro. Recently, human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (HUMSCs) have been introduced with higher efficacy for differentiation. In this work, we tried to explore the eff...

Mediastinal germ cell tumors are extragonadal germ cell tumors (EGGCTs) commonly seen in children and young adults. They are more common in men. Clinically they are classified as teratomas, seminomas, and nonseminomatous germ cell tumors. Primary mediastinal yolk sac neoplasm is an extremely rare tumor. We present here a very rare case of primary yolk sac tumor of the anterior mediastinum in a ...

5 Original Publications 8 Abbreviations 9 Introduction 10 Review of the Literature 11 1. Germ cells 11 1.1 Inner cell mass and embryonic stem cells 11 1.2 Factors essential for maintenance of pluripotency and self-renewal 11 1.3 Development and migration of germ cells 14 2. Gonadal development 16 2.1 Ovarian differ entiation 17 2.2 Testicular differentiation 18 3. GATA transcription factors in ...