BACKGROUND Spontaneous in vitro transition of undifferentiated spermatogonia into the pluripotent cell state has been achieved using neonatal and adult mouse testis tissue. In an effort to establish an analogous source of human patient-specific pluripotent stem cells, several research groups have described the derivation of embryonic stem cell-like cells from primary cultures of human testis. T...

The derivation of pluripotent stem cells (now termed induced pluripotent stem cells, iPSC) from mature somatic cells was a finding of seminal importance to fundamental cell biology. Being pluripotent (able to differentiate into every cell type present in the adult animal body) and sharing most other characteristics with embryonic stem cells, but being much readier obtainable and their derivatio...

Differentiated somatic cells can be reprogrammed into the pluripotent state by cell-cell fusion. In the pluripotent state, reprogrammed cells may then self-renew and differentiate into all three germ layers. Fusion-induced reprogramming also epigenetically modifies the somatic cell genome through DNA demethylation, X chromosome reactivation, and histone modification. In this study, we investiga...

Pluripotency is a unique developmental state that lays the foundation upon which the entire embryo is built. Pluripotent cells possess the unique capacity to generate, in an exquisitely defined sequence, all the distinct cell types comprising the fetal and adult organism. The discovery of pluripotent stem cells and now the ability to generate them from differentiated cells has had a profound im...

Domesticated ungulate pluripotent embryonic stem (ES) cell lines would be useful for generating precise gene-modified animals. To date, many efforts have been made to establish domesticated ungulate pluripotent ES cells from early embryos without success. Here, we report the generation of porcine-induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using drug-inducible expression of defined factors. We showed ...

Generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using defined factors has been considered a ground-breaking step towards establishing patient-specific pluripotent stem cells for various applications. The isolation of human embryonic stem (ES) cells set the standard that pluripotent stem cells are attainable as potentially immortal cells for regeneration of many types of tissues. Different ap...

Stem cells are a population of undifferentiated cells characterized by the ability to extensively proliferate (self-renewal), usually arise from a single cell (clonal), and differentiate into different types of cells and tissue (potent). There are several sources of stem cells with varying potencies. Pluripotent cells are embryonic stem cells derived from the inner cell mass of the embryo and i...

The presence of stem cell characteristics in glioma cells raises the possibility that mechanisms promoting the maintenance and self-renewal of tissue specific stem cells have a similar function in tumor cells. Here we characterized human gliomas of various malignancy grades for the expression of stem cell regulatory proteins. We show that cells in high grade glioma co-express an array of marker...

A mere 9 years have passed since the revolutionary report describing the derivation of induced pluripotent stem cells from human fibroblasts and the first in-patient translational use of cells obtained from these stem cells has already been achieved. From the perspectives of clinicians and researchers alike, the promise of induced pluripotent stem cells is alluring if somewhat beguiling. It is ...

The potential for human disease treatment using human pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), also carries the risk of added genomic instability. Genomic instability is most often linked to DNA repair deficiencies, which indicates that screening/characterization of possible repair deficiencies in pluripotent human stem cells should be a...