The ability to reprogram in vivo a somatic cell after differentiation is quite limited. One of the most impressive examples of such a process is transdifferentiation of pigmented epithelial cells (PECs) to lens cells during lens regeneration in newts. However, very little is known of the molecular events that allow newt cells to transdifferentiate. Histone B4 is an oocyte-type linker histone th...

Lineage plasticity, the ability to transdifferentiate among distinct phenotypic identities, facilitates therapeutic resistance in multiple cancers. In lung adenocarcinomas (LUADs), this phenomenon includes small cell and squamous (LUSC) histologic transdifferentiation context of acquired targeted inhibition driver mutations. The incidence into carcinoma EGFR mutant tumors, setting where shift h...

Alveolar epithelial type II (ATII) cells are essential for maintaining normal lung homeostasis because they produce surfactant, express innate immune proteins, and can function as progenitors for alveolar epithelial type I (ATI) cells. Although autocrine production of transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 has been shown to promote the transdifferentiation of primary rat ATII to ATI cells in vitro...

Transdifferentiation, where differentiated cells are reprogrammed into another lineage without going through an intermediate proliferative stem cell-like stage, is the next frontier of regenerative medicine. Wernig et al. first described the direct conversion of fibroblasts into functional induced neuronal cells (iNs). Subsequent reports of transdifferentiation into clinically relevant neuronal...

Recent months have seen rapid advances in the field of transdifferentiation, specifically in the conversion of fibroblasts to neurons. Most surprising is the observation that the ability to drive these transitions is not limited to transcription factors, but that they can be promoted by microRNAs as well. Indeed, in one case, microRNAs alone induced the transdifferentiation of fibroblasts to ne...

Non-neurogenic cell types, such as cortical astroglia and fibroblasts, can be directly converted into neurons by the overexpression of defined transcription factors. Normally, the cellular phenotype of such differentiated cells is remarkably stable and resists direct cell transdifferentiation. Here we show that the Ink4a/Arf (also known as Cdkn2a) locus is a developmental barrier to direct neur...

Developmentally, the pancreas and liver are closely related and pathological conditions - including elevated glucocorticoid levels - result in the appearance of hepatocytes in the pancreas. The role of the WNT signalling pathway in this process has been examined in the model transdifferentiating pancreatic acinar AR42J-B-13 (B-13) cell. Glucocorticoid treatment resulted in a transient loss of c...

TGF-β1, upregulated in keloid tissue, promotes the proliferation, collagen formation and differentiation of dermal fibroblasts. miR-21 is one of microRNAs first found in human genome. The aim of our study is to explore the mechanisms of miR-21 in TGF-β1-induced scar fibroblasts proliferation and transdifferentiation. In the present study, first we found that TGF-β1 promoted scar fibroblasts pro...

Fat infiltration within marrow cavity is one of multitudinous features of estrogen deficiency, which leads to a decline in bone formation functionality. The origin of this fat is unclear, but one possibility is that it is derived from osteoblasts, which transdifferentiate into adipocytes that produce bone marrow fat. We examined the dose-dependent effect of 17β-estradiol on the ability of MC3T3...