A UK-Japan partnership of scientists have uncovered a previously unrecognised regulatory pathway - a system of biological switches and actions - at the heart of embryonic stem cell biology. Their findings were reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Embryonic stem (ES) cells can give rise to every cell type of the body, an ability called pluripotency. For this reason they hold great promise as tools for drug development and regenerative medicine. Crucially, ES cells are able to self-renew - the technical term for stem cells dividing to generate more stem cells. This allows researchers to multiply them in unlimited quantities. How self-renewal is controlled has been something of a mystery.
Now an international collaborative effort, involving the teams of Prof. Austin Smith and Dr. Bertie Gottgens at the Wellcome Trust–MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, and Dr. Hitoshi Niwa from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan has exposed a previously unrecognised regulatory pathway at the heart of ES cell biology. The researchers found that a transcription factor (a type of protein) called Esrrb maintains pluripotency in ES cells and is connected directly to a cellular signaling pathway.
Dr. Graziano Martello, first author of the paper, commented: “These findings expand our understanding of how the behaviour of ES cells is controlled by their environment, bringing us closer to harnessing their potential for medical advances.”
This discovery was facilitated by development of new data-mining infrastructure within the Wellcome Trust – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, which will now be available as a public resource at http://bioinformatics.cscr.cam.ac.uk/ES_Cell_ChIP-seq_compendium.html. The collaborative link with Dr. Niwa was supported through a BBSRC Japan/UK Partnering Award.
Read more about biological pathways and how they work on the US National Human Genome Research Institute website.
Publication details:
Esrrb Is a Pivotal Target of the Gsk3/Tcf3 Axis Regulating Embryonic Stem Cell Self-Renewal, Cell Stem Cell, Volume 11, Issue 4, 491-504, 5 October 2012
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