Category Archives: Stem Cell Videos

The world's first "test-tube" meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post's aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

PHOTOS: 10 Ways Science is Using Human-Animal Hybrids

The ingredients for his first burger are "still in a laboratory phase," he said, but by fall "we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger."

Post, chair of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said his project is funded with 250,000 euros from an anonymous private investor motivated by "care for the environment, food for the world and interest in life-transforming technologies."

Post spoke at a symposium titled "The Next Agricultural Revolution" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Speakers said they aim to develop such "meat" products for mass consumption to reduce the environmental and health costs of conventional food production.

Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.

The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organized the symposium.

"But the majority of earth's pasture lands are already in use," he said, so conventional livestock producers can only meet the booming demand by further expansion into nature.

The result would be lost biodiversity, more greenhouse and other gases, and an increase in disease, he said.

In 2010 a report by the United Nations Environment Program called for a global vegetarian diet.

BLOG: Play With Your 3D Printed Food

"Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe," Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine told reporters.

"More to the point, it's incredibly ready to topple ... it's inefficient technology that hasn't changed fundamentally for millennia," he said.

"There's been a blind spot in the science and technology community (of livestock production) as an easy target."

Brown, who said he is funded by an American venture capital firm and has two start-ups in California, said he will devote the rest of his life to develop products that mimic meat but are made entirely from vegetable sources.

He is working "to develop and commercialize a product that can compete head on with meat and dairy products based on taste and value for the mainstream consumer, for people who are hard-core meat and cheese lovers who can't imagine ever giving that up, but could be persuaded if they had a product with all taste and value."

Brown said developing meat from animal cells in a laboratory will still have a high environmental cost, and so he said he will rely only on plant sources.

Both scientists said no companies in the existing meat industry have expressed interest.

Go here to see the original:
First Test-Tube Hamburger Ready This Fall

Would you like fries with that? British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal could be flipping test-tube burgers.

LURKING in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver is state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells.

Dr Mark Post, the head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger - produced at a cost of more than $290,000 - this October.

He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, southern England, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster.

Advertisement: Story continues below

A new meaning to instant meals ... food in a test-tube.

The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual, aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food and reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

''Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock,'' Dr Post said.

''You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. If you don't do anything meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive.''

Livestock contribute to global warming through unchecked releases of methane, a gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver, Dr Post said the burger would be a ''proof of concept'' to demonstrate that ''with in-vitro methods, out of stem cells we can make a product that looks like and feels and hopefully tastes like meat.''

Dr Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.

Dr Post and his team have so far grown thin sheets of cow muscle measuring 3 centimetres long, 1.5 centimetres wide and half a millimetre thick. To make a burger will take 3000 pieces of muscle and a few hundred pieces of fatty tissue, that will be minced together and pressed into a patty.

Each piece of muscle is made by extracting stem cells from cow muscle tissue and growing them in containers. The cells are grown in a culture medium containing foetal calf serum, which contains scores of nutrients the cells need to grow.

Guardian News & Media

Read more:
At $290,000 test-tube burger is a taste of what's to come

Test-tube burgers - coming soon to a restaurant near you?

A researcher from the Netherlands says he expects to grow the first-ever hamburger in a lab by this fall.  The beef will made from bovine stem cells grown in a petri dish.

Dr. Mark Post, the study leader, said the ultimate goal is the mass produce the lab meat in order to cut back on cattle farming.

Personally, I have a few problems with this study.  Yes, the beef will be made from stem cells, but don’t be confused: There is nothing natural about growing meat in the laboratory for human consumption.

With all the controversy on genetically altered food why in the world would we want to get into the business of creating hamburgers in a lab?

To me the whole concept of farming animals and crops is that the practice contributes to the natural process of life.  The more natural the process, the healthier it is, in my opinion.

Many of the medical crises we’re seeing in the world today are partly due to some of the unnatural ways we’re manufacturing food – from the chemicals to preserve the taste, to the hormones to increase the size of produce, to the pesticides to control production.  At the end of the day, all of these factors are taking a toll on our society.

Now, I’m familiar with stem cell research, and I’m sure that Dr. Holt is creating very pure forms of muscle cells, but I believe the focus of stem cell regeneration should continue to be for the quest to eradicate human diseases.

To take this promising medical technology and commercialize it in such a way to create a for-profit industry like making hamburger patties to stock your local grocery store is disrespectful to the thousands of scientists who have studied – and continue to study – the life-saving potential of stem cells.

But maybe I’m wrong – tell me what you think.  Would you eat this burger?

See the original post:
Scientists using stem cells to grow hamburger in a lab

(CNN) -

If you're concerned about the ethics of livestock production but don't want to become a vegetarian, consider this: It may be possible to grow meat in a petri dish.

Dr. Mark Post, professor of vascular physiology at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, is working on creating meat from bovine stem cells. And he's planning to unveil a burger created this way in October, he said Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Croplands and pastures occupy about 35% of the planet's ice-free land surface, according to a 2007 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"Meat consumption is going to double in the next 40 years or so, so we need to come up with alternatives to solve the land issue," Post said.

Post's financial backer, whose identity Post would not disclose, is providing 250,000 euros (about $330,000) toward the development of this hamburger. And the financier has the right to choose who will be the lucky person to taste this futuristic burger, Post said.

The scientists say their creations are not quite at the level of hamburger, though -- samples from cultures are currently about 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) long and weigh only half a gram. That's too small to cook. Post hasn't tasted it yet himself.

To get the samples bigger and more burger-looking, scientists may grow them on a spherical surface. Eventually they'd like to be able to create big slabs of meat, Post said.

The color is pinkish-yellowish, and Post and colleagues would like to make it look more appetizing in a natural way. Meat in typical hamburgers gets its color partly from blood. One way to make the stem-cell meat more authentic-looking is to use caffeine to coerce the cells to produce more myoglobin, a type of protein that carries iron and oxygen.

Apart from the "meat," scientists need to grow fat separately, for the juiciness and taste of the final product.

Right now the process doesn't involve harming animals -- researchers are using leftover materials from slaughterhouses. But in the future, the process could use animals that would be killed so that all of their stem cells could be harvested, he said.

You could get about 1 million times as many burgers from a single cow using these stem cell methods as you would from traditional processes, Post said.

But obviously Post's process is expensive and requires a lot of effort.

So how long will it take until the process of making stem cell burgers becomes more efficient than regular burgers?

With the resources Post and colleagues have right now, it's never going to happen, he says. With unlimited resources, it would still take 10 to 20 years.

Copyright 2012 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read more here:
Effort aims to create meat from bovine stem cells

Prototype burger will cost ?220,000 to produce

By Fiona Macrae Science Correspondent

Last updated at 1:09 AM on 20th February 2012

The world’s first test-tube burger will be ready to eat within months.

It will look, feel and, it is hoped, taste, like a regular quarter-pounder, its creator Mark Post told the world’s premier science conference.

He plans to unveil the hamburger in October - and hopes celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal will cook it, although he has yet to approach him.

Tasty: A small sample of the lab-grown 'meat' which Dutch stem cell scientist Dr Mark Post believes everyone will want to eat

The ‘ethical meat’ will would be kinder to the environment than the real thing, reduce animal suffering and help feed the world’s burgeoning population.

But it will be far from cheap with the prototype burger costing ?220,000 to produce.

Professor Post says that ‘everyone’ will want to eat the burgers, which, despite their vast initial cost could eventually be priced to match that of real meat.

However, it remains to be seen whether a public that likes to think of its chops, steaks and sausages as having their roots in nature will take to meat made in test-tubes.

The Maastricht Univeristy professor has spent the last six years trying to turn stem cells - ‘master cells’ with the power to turn into all other cell types - into meat.

Real thing: But the new meat  could be an ethical alternative to beef

He first attempts involved mouse burgers. He then tried to grow pork in a dish, producing strips with the rubbery texture of squid or scallops, before settling on beef.

A four-step technique is used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger.

First, the stem cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle.

Next, they are incubated in a nutrient broth until they multiply many times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg.

This ‘wasted muscle’ is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise - it is anchored to Velcro and stretched.

Finally, 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced, and, along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, formed into a burger.

The process is still lengthy, as well as expensive, but optimised, it could take just six weeks from stem cell to supermarket shelf.

Yesterday, Professor Post told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in Vancouver that he has so far made a strip of beef measuring 3cm by 1.5cm by 0.5cm.

This beef is ‘pinkish to yellow’ in colour - but he is confident of having a full-sized and properly coloured burger by the autumn.

The professor, who is funded by an anonymous but highly-successful benefactor, said: ‘It’s not quite ready, it’s going to be presented in October.

‘We are going to provide a proof of concept, showing that out of stem cells you can produce a product that looks like and feels like and hopefully tastes like meat.

‘Seeing and tasting is believing.’ Sausages and other processed meat products could swiftly follow, although pork chops and sirloin steaks will be much more problematic.

Other possibilities include synthetic versions of the meat from are animals such as pandas and tigers.

Choice: Professor Post hopes experimental chef Heston Blumenthal will have a go at cooking his new invention

Meats could also be made extra-healthy by boosting their content of ‘good’ fats.

Far fewer animals would have to be kept to satisfy the appetite for meat.

The stem cell’s extraordinary ability to grow and multiply means that a cells taken from a single cow could produce a million times more burgers than if the animal was slaughtered for meat.

Researchers say they realise that many will find the idea of eating lab-grown meat unnatural - but point out that the livestock eaten at the moment is often kept in cramped conditions and dosed with chemicals or antibiotics.

However, the fact that the source material comes from animals who will likely have slaughtered means that not all vegetarians will be happy with the product.

The fledgling technology was highlighted in discussion paper about current and future demands on livestock production published recently by the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body.

The paper’s author, Professor Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute in Edinburgh, wrote: ‘This is one example of something that could happen in the future that could have a very big impact on agriculture and livestock production.

‘There are some advantages to the idea. For example, you could reduce the number of live animals substantially and that would reduce greenhouse gas production.

‘There might be human health benefits because the health and safety issues associated with meat could be much better controlled.

‘But are people going to eat it? People’s tastes have changed a lot over the years and eventually this may be something that is widely taken up.’

Cautioning about the economic impact on farmers, the professor said: ‘If you are talking about large-scale reductions in numbers of livestock, there are large-scale implications and we’d have to look very carefully to see if the benefits would outweigh some of the problems that might arise.’

It will be at least ten years before the artificial meat is produced on an industrial scale and has satisfied the safety testing necessary for it be placed on supermarket shelves.

The rest is here:
Test tube burgers could hit kitchens this year after scientists create meat with taste of quarter-pounder

The world's first "test-tube" meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post's aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

The ingredients for his first burger are "still in a laboratory phase," he said, but by fall "we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger."

Post, chair of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said his project is funded with 250,000 euros from an anonymous private investor motivated by "care for the environment, food for the world, and interest in life-transforming technologies."

Post spoke at a symposium titled "The Next Agricultural Revolution" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Speakers said they aim to develop such "meat" products for mass consumption to reduce the environmental and health costs of conventional food production.

Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.

The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organized the symposium.

"But the majority of earth's pasture lands are already in use," he said, so conventional livestock producers can only meet the booming demand by further expansion into nature.

The result would be lost biodiversity, more greenhouse and other gases, and an increase in disease, he said.

In 2010 a report by the United Nations Environment Program called for a global vegetarian diet.

"Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe," Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine told reporters.

"More to the point, it's incredibly ready to topple ... it's inefficient technology that hasn't changed fundamentally for millennia," he said.

"There's been a blind spot in the science and technology community (of livestock production) as an easy target."

Brown, who said he is funded by an American venture capital firm and has two start-ups in California, said he will devote the rest of his life to develop products that mimic meat but are made entirely from vegetable sources.

He is working "to develop and commercialize a product that can compete head on with meat and dairy products based on taste and value for the mainstream consumer, for people who are hard-core meat and cheese lovers who can't imagine ever giving that up, but could be persuaded if they had a product with all taste and value."

Brown said developing meat from animal cells in a laboratory will still have a high environmental cost, and so he said he will rely only on plant sources.

Both scientists said no companies in the existing meat industry have expressed interest.

See the rest here:
First test-tube hamburger ready this fall: researchers

A research team led by UC Davis Health System scientists has developed a novel technique to enhance bone growth by using a molecule which, when injected into the bloodstream, directs the body's stem cells to travel to the surface of bones.

Once these cells are guided to the bone surface by this molecule, the stem cells differentiate into bone-forming cells and synthesize proteins to enhance bone growth. The study, which was published online today in Nature Medicine, used a mouse model of osteoporosis to demonstrate a unique treatment approach that increases bone density and prevents bone loss associated with aging and estrogen deficiency.

"There are many stem cells, even in elderly people, but they do not readily migrate to bone," said Wei Yao, the principal investigator and lead author of the study. "Finding a molecule that attaches to stem cells and guides them to the targets we need is a real breakthrough."

Researchers are exploring stem cells as possible treatments for a wide variety of conditions and injuries, ranging from peripheral artery disease and macular degeneration to blood disorders, skin wounds and diseased organs. Directing stem cells to travel and adhere to the surface of bone for bone formation has been among the elusive goals in regenerative medicine.

The researchers made use of a unique hybrid molecule, LLP2A-alendronate, developed by a research team led by Kit Lam, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of

Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. The researchers' hybrid molecule consists of two parts: the LLP2A part that attaches to mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow, and a second part that consists of the bone-homing drug alendronate. After the hybrid molecule was injected into the bloodstream, it picked up mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow and directed those cells to the surfaces of bone, where the stem cells carried out their natural bone-formation and repair functions.

"Our study confirms that stem-cell-binding molecules can be exploited to direct stem cells to therapeutic sites inside an animal," said Lam, who also is an author of the article. "It represents a very important step in making this type of stem cell therapy a reality."

View original post here:
Stem cells used to increase bone strength

Embargoed for Use Until
4 p.m. (EST), Feb. 17, 2012

Newswise — What if we could engineer a liver or kidney from a patient's own stem cells? How about helping regenerate tissue damaged by diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis? A new UCLA study bring scientists a little closer to these possibilities by providing a better understanding how tissue is formed and organized in the body.

A UCLA research team discovered that migrating cells prefer to turn right when encountering changes in their environment. The researchers were then able to translate what was happening in the cells to recreate this left–right asymmetry on a tissue level. Such asymmetry is important in creating differences between the right and left sides of structures like the brain and the hand.

The research, a collaboration between the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Center for Cell Control at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, appears in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Circulation Research.

"Our findings suggest a mechanism and design principle for the engineering of tissue," said senior author Dr. Linda L. Demer, a professor of medicine, physiology and bioengineering and executive vice chair of the department of medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine. "Tissue and organs are not simply collections of cells but require careful architecture and design to function normally. Our findings help explain how cells can distinguish and develop highly specific left–right asymmetry, which is an important foundation in tissue and organ creation."

Using microtechnology, the team engineered a culture surface in the lab with alternating strips of protein substrates that were cell-adhesive or cell-repellent, analogous to a floor with narrow horizontal stripes of alternating carpet and tile. Cells may encounter such surface changes when they travel through the body.
?
The researchers observed that as the migrating cells crossed the interface between "carpet" and "tile" sections, they exhibited a significant tendency to turn right by 20 degrees, and, like a marching band, lined up in long, parallel rows, producing diagonal stripes over the entire surface.

"We had been noticing how these vascular cells would spontaneously form structures in cultures and wanted to study the process," said first author Ting-Hsuan Chen, a graduate student researcher in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA Engineering. "We had no idea our substrates would trigger the left–right asymmetry that we observed in the cells. It was completely unexpected.

"We found that cells demonstrated the ability to distinguish right from left and to self-organize in response to mechanical changes in the surfaces that they encounter. This provides insight into how to communicate with cells in their language and how to begin to instruct them to produce tissue-like architecture."

According to the researchers, the cells can sense the substrates beneath them, and this influences the direction of their migration and what shapes they form in the body. Of most interest, the researchers said, was the fact that the cells responded to the horizontal stripes by reorganizing themselves into diagonal stripes.

The team hopes to harness this phenomenon to use substrate interfaces to communicate with cells and instruct them to produce desired tissue structures for replacement. By adjusting the substrates, the researchers say, they have the potential to guide what structures the cells and tissue form.

The next stage of the research will be to control and guide cells to self-organize into two-dimensional and, eventually, three-dimensional patterns chosen by the researchers.

According to the research team, this is one of the first studies to demonstrate that encountering a change in substrate can trigger a cell's preference for turning left or right. It is also one of the first studies showing that cells can integrate left–right asymmetry into a patterned structure of parallel diagonal stripes resembling tissue architecture.

"Applications for this research may help in future engineering of organs from a patient's own stem cells," Demer said. "This would be especially important given the limited supply of donor organs for transplant and problems with immune rejection."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Additional authors included Jeffrey J. Hsu, Alan Garfinkel and Yin Tintut from the UCLA Department of Medicine; Yi Huang and Chih-Ming Ho from the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Xin Zhao, Chunyan Guo and Zongwei Li from the

Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System at China's Nankai University; and Margaret Wong from the UCLA Department of Bioengineering.

For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.

Comment/Share

Original post:
UCLA Discovery that Migrating Cells "Turn Right' has Implications for Engineering Tissues, Organs

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Investigators at The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles have found that amniotic fluid stem cells (AFSC) can slow the progression of chronic kidney disease. A new study, published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, reveals that these stem cells can protect the kidneys and help maintain their function.

“We believe that this novel and innovative study clearly demonstrates the value and promise for amniotic fluid stem cells,” comments Roger De Filippo, MD, head of the GOFARR Laboratory for Organ Regenerative Research and Cell Therapeutics at The Saban Research Institute.

Using a model for Alport’s Syndrome, Dr. De Filippo’s team, which includes Dr. Laura Perin, one of the original investigators of AFSC and co-director of the GOFARR Laboratory, injected AFSC early in the course of the disease. Alport’s Syndrome is a kidney disease characterized by progressive renal fibrosis. Treatment with AFSC increased survival time and ameliorated the decline in kidney function.

Kidneys are responsible for filtering toxins from the blood. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects millions of children and adults in the United States. Characterized by a progressive decline in kidney function, CKD leads to an increase in health problems, including heart disease and diabetes. Those who develop end-stage kidney disease depend on dialysis to clear the waste from their blood and, ultimately, most patients require a kidney transplant in order to survive. With such stark long-term consequences, the new study offers hope to those suffering from the disease and is also a significant advancement in the stem cell research field.

Stem cell therapies have emerged over the last twenty years as a promising new area of biomedical research. While embryonic stem cells remain a controversial subject, AFSC are found in the fluid surrounding a fetus. The cells can be collected via amniocentesis or at birth without any harmful effects. This study demonstrates that the therapeutic benefit of AFSC is similar to that of embryonic stem cells.

“These findings are of significant interest to stem cell researchers. By using these common cells that are easily obtained, we can focus on other types of therapeutic studies that offer hope to many patients with chronic disabilities and disease,” says David Warburton, DSc, MD, director of the Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine Research program at The Saban Research Institute. This work was funded in part by a training grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, GOFARR and the Pasadena Guild of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

About Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Children's Hospital Los Angeles has been named the best children’s hospital in California and among the best in the nation for clinical excellence with its selection to the prestigious US News & World Report Honor Roll. Children’s Hospital is home to The Saban Research Institute, one of the largest and most productive pediatric research facilities in the United States, is one of America's premier teaching hospitals and has been affiliated with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California since 1932.

For more information, visit www.CHLA.org. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, or visit our blog: http://www.WeAreChildrens.org.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50172377&lang=en

MULTIMEDIA AVAILABLE:http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50172377&lang=en

Excerpt from:
Investigators at The Saban Research Institute Demonstrate That Amniotic Fluid Stem Cells Can Slow Progression of ...

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Scientists have found a way to generate and maintain stem cells much more efficiently by amplifying the effect of an essential protein.

Researchers from Denmark, Scotland and the USA have created synthetic versions of a protein, which manipulates adult cells -- such as skin cells -- so that they can subsequently revert to an earlier, embryonic like state. These reverted cells have the potential to become any cell in the body.

As well as reverting adult cells to this state -- known as induced pluripotent stem cells , the protein also plays a key role in maintaining embryonic stem cells in a pure form. If the protein -- Oct4 -- is not present, the embryonic stem cells will start to differentiate into specific cells.

In order to reprogamme adult cells to have stem cell properties viruses need to be added to cell cultures to trigger production of significant quantities of Oct4.

Oct4 plays a powerful role in regulating stem cell genes. However, while large quantities of Oct4 are needed too much of it can ruin the properties of stem cells.

Scientists, whose work is published in the journal Cell Reports, were able to overcome this by producing a synthetic version of Oct4 that amplified the effect of the protein in its natural form.

The synthetic version of Oct4 was much more efficient in turning on genes that instruct cells on how to be stem cells and, as a result, the cells did not need as much Oct4 for either reprogramming or to remain as stem cells -- thereby eliminating problems caused by too much Oct4.

In fact, the synthetic Oct4 could support stem cells under conditions that they do not normally grow. These findings could also help scientists find new ways generate stem cells in the laboratory.

The study showed that Oct4 was mainly responsible for turning on genes that instruct cells on how to become stem cells, rather than turning off genes that encourage the cells to differentiate.

"Our discovery is an important step towards generating and maintaining stem cells much more effectively," says Professor Joshua Brickman, affiliated with both The Danish Stem Cell Center (DanStem), University of Copenhagen and Medical Research Council Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

"Embryonic stem cells are characterized, among other things, by their ability to perpetuate themselves indefinitely and differentiate into all the cell types in the body -- a trait called pluripotency. But to be able to use them medically, we need to be able to maintain them in a pure state, until they're needed. When we want to turn a stem cell into a specific cell, such as insulin producing beta cell, or a nerve cell in the brain, we'd like this process to occur accurately and efficiently. This will not be possible if we don't understand how to maintain stem cells as stem cells. As well as maintaining embryonic stem cells in their pure state more effectively, the artificially created Oct4 was also more effective at reprogramming adult cells into so-called induced Pluripotent Stem cells, which have many of the same traits and characteristics as embryonic stem cells but can derived from the patients to both help study degenerative disease and eventually treat them."

Oct4 is a so-called transcription factor -- a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow (or transcription) of genetic information from DNA to mRNA. The synthetic version of Oct4 was created by using recombinant DNA technology whereby a gene was modified to produce new and more active protein. The modified gene was either introduced into stem cells or used to reprogram adult skin cells.

If scientists can exploit this programming of stem cell programs, it will improve the ability to generate stem cells directly from a patient. These cells could in turn potentially be used for individualised studies and for developing individualized therapies for degenerative diseases such as type 1 diabetes and neuro-degenerative diseases.

The study involved mouse embryonic stem cells, early embryonic progenitors cells in frogs as well as iPS cells from both mouse and human sources. The research was supported by grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (DK), the Medical Reseach Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (MRC and BBSRC, UK).

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Edinburgh.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Fella Hammachi, Gillian M. Morrison, Alexei A. Sharov, Alessandra Livigni, Santosh Narayan, Eirini P. Papapetrou, James O'Malley, Keisuke Kaji, Minoru S.H. Ko, Mark Ptashne, Joshua M. Brickman. Transcriptional Activation by Oct4 Is Sufficient for the Maintenance and Induction of Pluripotency. Cell Reports, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2011.12.002

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Excerpt from:
Synthetic protein amplifies genes needed for stem cells