 |
Dedifferentiation may be used normally to maintain and repair tissues. There has been a great deal of success in taking an undifferentiated cell and directing its differentiation into a particular cell type. But the challenge remains to make those cells do something useful. We’ve started to look at the process of dedifferentiation, which is thought to take place normally in the body as part of some wound-healing and repair processes. Dedifferentiation may be a useful approach to the end goal of medically oriented stem-cell research, which is to correct adult degenerative conditions in a valuable way.
One of the problems in studying dedifferentiation has been the lack of an accessible system to study how it works. Postdoc Toshie Kai devised a method that takes germline stem cells [from which egg or sperm cells are derived], causes them to differentiate to the 8-cell stage, and then reverts them back at 100-percent efficiency. We’ve used these events as an assay to look for genes that turn off when the stem-cell state is lost and that come back when the stem-cell state returns. This assay has given us some new genetic handles on stem-cell regulation. But the pathways that stop development and reverse its course are still not understood.
|
|
|
