CAS researchers have made progress in the studies of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS).
With the support of CAS, Ministry of Science and Technology and National Natural Science Foundation of China, a research team led by PEI Duanrui from South China Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, the CAS Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, takes the lead in China in conducting research into the mechanisms for pluripotency maintain and self-regeneration of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), and their work includes a series of explorations on the functions of such transcription factors as Oct4,Sox2 and Nanog in ESCs.
Recently, the research team has been successful in generating iPS from unmodified mouse embryonic fibroblasts by retroviral introduction of Oct4/Sox2/Myc/Klf4 without drug selection. As reported in the November issue of
Cell Research, the feat shows a new approach for the direct employment of iPS technology with a successful rate up to 0.3%.
First invented by Japanese scientists in 2006, the similar iPS technology has recently helped research teams in Japan and US to make breakthroughs in reprogramming adult stem cells to create cells that are indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells.
Scientists believe that this protocol based on genetically unmodified cells should facilitate further investigations into the mechanisms of somatic cell reprogramming and the eventual application to human diseases.
