Gastrointestinal stem cells in self-renewal and cancer.

The gastrointestinal epithelium is a unique model for the study of mammalian stem cells. Not only does it have a highly stereotypical organization, its remarkable rate of self-renewal provides a daily readout of stem cell activity. The past decade has seen a major investment in developing technologies dedicated to revealing the identity of the long-elusive gastrointestinal stem cells.

Subfractionation of differentiating human embryonic stem cell populations allows the isolation of a mesodermal population enriched for intermediate mesoderm and putative renal progenitors.

Human embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent and are believed to be able to generate all cell types in the body. As such, they have potential applications in regenerative therapy for kidney disease. However, before this can be achieved, a protocol to differentiate human ES cells to mesodermal renal progenitor lineages is required.

Transcriptional analysis of early lineage commitment in human embryonic stem cells.

Background: The mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of pluripotency in human embryonic stem cells, and those that drive their commitment into particular differentiation lineages, are poorly understood. In fact, even our knowledge of the phenotype of hESC is limited, because the immunological and molecular criteria presently used to define this phenotype describe the properties of a heterogeneous population of cells.

Results: We used a novel approach combining immunological and transcriptional analysis (immunotranscriptional profiling) to compare gene expression in hESC populations at very early stages of differentiation.