Despite the significance for fetal nourishment in mammals, mechanisms of umbilical cord vascular growth remain poorly understood. Here, the secreted metalloprotease ADAMTS9 is shown to be necessary for murine umbilical cord vascular development. Restricting it to the cell surface using a gene trap allele, Adamts9(Gt), impaired umbilical vessel elongation and radial growth via reduced versican p...

BACKGROUND Keratoplasty is the most effective treatment for corneal blindness, but suboptimal medical conditions and lack of qualified medical personnel and donated cornea often prevent the performance of corneal transplantation in developing countries. Our study aims to develop alternative treatment regimens for congenital corneal diseases of genetic mutation. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS ...

In this study, we tried explant method and a combination of explant-enzymatic method for the extraction of Mesenchymal Stem Cells from ovine umbilical cord tissue wharton’s jelly. The isolated and culture expanded cells expressed strong alkaline phosphatase activity and they were shown to form colonies. The Mesenchymal Stem Cells showed positive for CD44 and negative for CD34 surface markers by...

The aim of the study was to investigate the possibility of human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (UC-MSCs) surviving and differentiating into hepatocyte-like cells in partially hepatectomized model rats. MSCs were isolated from human umbilical cord and cultured with collagenase digestion. Cell surface markers were detected and fifth generation UC-MSCs were labeled with PKH26. The partiall...

introduction: a number of potential cell adhesion molecules, which mediate essential cell-to-cell or cell-to-matrix interactions, are expressed on the surface of cd34+ hematopoietic progenitor cells (hpcs), including integrins, cd44, and cxcr4. these molecules are essential for homing process. in this study, we compared the changes of expression of cd44 and cxcr4 on the cd34+ hematopoietic prog...

The umbilical cord has become an increasingly used source of mesenchymal stromal cells for preclinical and, more recently, clinical studies. Despite the increased activity, several aspects of this cell population have been under-appreciated. Key issues are that consensus on the anatomical structures within the cord is lacking, and potentially different populations are identified as arising from...

Background: Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is an alternative source of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), used in Leukemia treatment. CD26+ cells, a fraction of CD34 positive cells, are a major population of UCB cells which negatively regulate the in vivo homing and engraftment of HSCs. CD26 is highly expressed in various cells such as HSCs, immune cells, fibroblasts, and epithelial ce...