Niches are local tissue microenvironments that maintain and regulate stem cells. Long-predicted from mammalian studies, these structures have recently been characterized within several invertebrate tissues using methods that reliably identify individual stem cells and their functional requirements. Although similar single-cell resolution has usually not been achieved in mammalian tissues, princ...

Background: Human Cripto-1, a member of the EGF-CFC family, is involved in embryonic development, embryonic stem cell maintenance, and tumor progression. It also participates in multiple cell signaling pathways including Wnt, Notch, and TGF-β. Remarkably, it is expressed in cancer stem cell (CSC) compartments, boosting tumor cell migration, invasion, and angiogenesis. Although Cripto-1 is ...

OTT was first identified as part of the recurrent t(1;22) translocation in acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL) and was called OTT for “one twenty-two.” OTT1 is also known as RNA binding motif protein 15 (RBM15). Like other RNA binding motif proteins, RBM15 contains RNA recognition motifs (RRMs), 3 in total, which can bind to RNA and, at least for some RRMs, may also bind to DNA. Lifelong mai...

Hair graying is an obvious sign of human aging, yet little was known about its causes. Two recent papers provide compelling evidence that hair graying is due to incomplete melanocyte stem cell maintenance and identify Pax3 and Mitf as key molecules that help regulate the balance between melanocyte stem cell maintenance and differentiation.

Postembryonic organ formation in higher plants relies on the activity of stem cell niches in shoot and root meristems where differentiation of the resident cells is repressed by signals from surrounding cells. We searched for mutations affecting stem cell maintenance and isolated the semidominant l28 mutant, which displays premature termination of the shoot meristem and differentiation of the s...

To overcome the difficulty of controlling stem cell fate and function in applications to regenerative medicine, a number of alternative approaches have been made. Recent reports demonstrate that a non-cellular niche modulating the biophysical microenvironment with chemical factors can support stem cell self-renewal. In our previous studies, early establishment was executed to optimize biophysic...

tissue and cell transplantation are regarded as a popular procedure in clinical sciences, prospecting a new horizon for several incurable diseases. along with its usefulness, many ethical concerns accompany this development. the ethical issue of organ transplant is unique to the source used which includes: living related, living unrelated, cadaveric, and xenotransplant. obtaining organs has a s...

objective(s): bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (bm-mscs) potentials make them appropriate for cell therapy including ability of differentiation and release of anti-inflammatory cytokines and growth factors secreta. for treatment of azoospermia to induce proliferation and differentiation of germ cells, mscs transplantation has been introduced. the aim of the present experimental case-c...

the provision of an adequate quantity of cells with proper function and purity is one of the main challenges of tissue engineering studies. stem cells, with their self-renewal and differentiation capacity, are considered one of the main cell sources in the field of tissue engineering. previously, the use of chemical factors seemed to be the only possible way for stem cell differentiation. howev...

objective: demyelination of cns axons occurs under pathological conditions such as multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries, but can be repaired by cell therapy. within the cns remyelination can be achieved by transplantation of neural stem cells (nscs). nscs are self-renewing cells that maintain the capacity to differentiate into cns-specific cell types and can differentiate into the three ...