FIND ARTICLE

POTENTIAL APPLICATION OF GERM LINE STEM CELLS IN REGENERATIVE MEDICINE

The rapidly developing regenerative medicine searches for pluripotential stem cell that will be able to differentiate into stem cells from all three germ layers. In this review we will focus on germ line stem cells that have been recently purified from adult ovaries, testes and other extragonadal tissues. We will discuss their potential clinical application and their relationship of these cells to so called very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs), a population of epiblast/germ line pluripotent stem cells identified recently by our team in adult tissues.

VERY SMALL EMBRYONIC LIKE STEM CELLS (VSELS) ISOLATED FROM ADULT TISSUES - AN UPDATE

Accumulating evidence demonstrates that adult tissues contain a population of very pluripotent stem cells and recently our group identified a population of very small stem cells in murine bone marrow and other adult organs that express several markers characteristic for epiblast/germ line-derived cells. We named these rare cells "very small embryonic/epiblast like stem cells (VSELs)'. We hypothesized that these cells, which are deposited during early gastrulation in developing tissues/organs, play an important role in the turnover of tissue-specific/committed stem cells.

The Editorial Board
Andrzej Łukaszyk - przewodniczący, Zofia Bielańska-Osuchowska, Szczepan Biliński, Mieczysław Chorąży, Aleksander Koj, Włodzimierz Korochoda, Leszek Kuźnicki, Aleksandra Stojałowska, Lech Wojtczak

Editorial address:
Katedra i Zakład Histologii i Embriologii Uniwersytetu Medycznego w Poznaniu, ul. Święcickiego 6, 60-781 Poznań, tel. +48 61 8546453, fax. +48 61 8546440, email: mnowicki@ump.edu.pl

PBK Postępby biologi komórki