There has been quite a lot of pubs on research on pluripotent stem cells published lately. These include some more surprising findings such as a potential role for pluripotency-related programming in neural crest development.
Here the week’s recommended reads.
Neural Crest research: ties to factors involved in pluripotent stem cells
- Science, Reactivation of the pluripotency program precedes formation of the cranial neural crest. I found this one particular interesting with Oct4 and Nanog having roles in neural crest cells. Zalc, et al. also reported epiblast-like programming is involved more generally. With Sox2 also in the mix on very early in the neural crest cell lineage, I wonder if sometimes attempts to reprogram cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells) sometimes produces neural crest-like cells instead. See Figure 2B above.
- Stem Cells, On the road again: Establishment and maintenance of stemness in the neural crest from embryo to adulthood, a review.
Pubs on pluripotent stem cells
- Nature Neuroscience, Fully defined human pluripotent stem cell derived microglia and tri-culture system model C3 production in Alzheimer’s disease
- Stem Cells, A human induced pluripotent stem cell based modular platform to challenge sensorineural hearing loss
Cancer stem cells
Nature Reviews in Cancer, Linking EMT programmes to normal and neoplastic epithelial stem cells.