The Hippo/YAP pathway serves as a major integrator of cell surface-mediated signals and regulates key processes during development and tumorigenesis. The neural crest is an embryonic tissue known to respond to multiple environmental cues in order to acquire appropriate cell fate and migration properties. Using multiple in vitro models of human neural development (pluripotent stem cell-derived n...

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are a promising source for cell replacement therapies. Parkinson's disease is one of the candidate diseases for the cell replacement therapy since the motor manifestations of the disease are associated with the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta. Stromal cell-derived inducing activity (SDIA) is the most commonly used method for ...

The mechanism by which an apparently uniform population of cells can generate a heterogeneous population of differentiated derivatives is a fundamental aspect of pluripotent and multipotent stem cell behaviour. One possibility is that the environment and the differentiation cues to which the cells are exposed are not uniform. An alternative, but not mutually exclusive possibility is that the ob...

Timelapse microscopy imaging allows for long term monitoring of biological processes however a major bottleneck in assesing experimental outcome is the need for an automated analysis framework to extract essential statistics. In this study, we use Gabor texture descriptors to generate a high dimensional feature space which is analysed with PCA to provide unsupervised characterisation of texture...

When treated with retinoic acid (RA), a human embryonal carcinoma (EC) cell line, NTera2 cl.D/1 (NT2), differentiates into several morphologically distinct cell types, which include terminally differentiated postmitotic central nervous system (CNS) neurons. Accumulating evidence has demonstrated the significant potential of NT2 cells in studies related to cancer therapy and neurodegenerative di...

Although testicular germ cell tumors are generally quite responsive to treatment with cisplatin, a small fraction of them acquire resistance during therapy. Even when cisplatin treatment is successful the patient is often left with a residual teratoma at the site of the primary tumor suggesting that cisplatin may trigger differentiation in some tumors. Using the human embryonal carcinoma cell l...