Plasticity of Somatic Stem Cells

Stem cells are cells that can self-renew and give rise to different progeny. The progeny a stem cell generates differs between stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, which are derived from the inner cell mass of blastocyst stage embryos, can generate every cell type of an organism. This is called pluripotency. In contrast, adult stem cells which are located in specific places of an organism can only give rise to cells belonging to the tissue in which they reside. It has been shown, however, that adult stem cells exhibit plastic behavior, i.e. have the ability to form other tissues than the tissue in which they reside, under special conditions. Very recently Yamanaka and colleagues showed that four factors yet are sufficient to reverse fully differentiated somatic cells into pluripotent cells.

We are interested in the cellular and molecular mechanisms that reverse the nuclear program of somatic cells towards a program associated with pluripotency. In addition we investigate the programs underlying self-renewal and differentiation of neural stem cells.