Hypoxic preconditioning (HP) and stem cell transplantation have been extensively studied as individual therapies for ischemic stroke. The present investigation is an initial effort to combine these methods to achieve increased therapeutic effects after brain ischemia. Sublethal in vitro hypoxia pretreatment significantly enhanced the tolerance of neurally-differentiating embryonic stem (ES) cel...

Stem cells are cells that are capable of self-renewal and are multipotent, meaning that they can differentiate into many specific cell types. For a long time, “stem cell” had been a concept in mammalian biology but not a reality that could be seen, touched, and expanded in vitro, until murine embryonic stem cell culture was established in 1981. Through recent progress made in adult stem cell re...

Hematopoiesis generated from human embryonic stem cells (ES) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are unprecedented resources for cell therapy. We compared hematopoietic differentiation potentials from ES and iPS cell lines originated from various donors and derived them using integrative and non-integrative vectors. Significant differences in differentiation toward hematopoietic lineage we...

Embryonic stem cells, derived from the inner cell mass of embryos in the blastocyst stage, are cells capable of perpetual self-renewal and long-term propagation and hold the potential to differentiate to progeny of the three embryonic germ layers. Since their derivation approximately two decades ago, exploration of mouse ES cells made major advances in ES cell differentiation research and in th...

Glycosylation of proteins and lipids on cell surface have been shown to be important in maintaining pluripotency and stem cell fate in embryonic stem cells. Lectins have been widely used to characterize carbohydrate modifications on cell surface of embryonic stem cells to determine pluripotency and stem cell fate. In the present study, a panel of 14 lectins and carbohydrate antibodies was used ...

Microinjection of small noncoding RNAs in one-cell embryos was reported in several instances to result in transcriptional activation of target genes. To determine the molecular mechanisms involved and to explore whether such epigenetic regulations could play a role in early development, we used a cell culture system as close as possible to the embryonic state. We report efficient cardiac differ...

The use of human embryos for research on embryonic stem (ES) cells is currently high on the ethical and political agenda in many countries. Despite the potential bene®t of using human ES cells in the treatment of disease, their use remains controversial because of their derivation from early embryos. Here, we address some of the ethical issues surrounding the use of human embryos and human ES c...

muscle dystrophin expression (Gussoni et al., 1999). The Our limited life expectancy, and inevitable death, is origin of the adult stem cells is not known. They may be brought about by the ongoing deterioration of the body’s residual undifferentiated embryonic cells or, as recent essential cell types, tissues, and organs. Thus, either a evidence suggests, committed/differentiated adult cells re...

Pancreatic endocrine β-cells derived from embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have received attention as screening systems for therapeutic drugs and as the basis for cell-based therapies. Here, we used a 12-day β-cell differentiation protocol for mouse ES cells and obtained several hit compounds that promoted β-cell differentiation. One of these compounds, mycophe...

Critical transcription factors, notably OCT4, SOX2, and NANOG, are necessary to maintain self-renewal and pluripotency, two properties characteristic of embryonic stem (ES) cells. By analyzing the genome-wide localization of these factors at promoter regions in human ES cells, Boyer et al. (2005) demonstrate frequent promoter co-occupancy at numerous target genes. As they discuss in this issue ...