Postnatal Pluripotent Cells: Quarter of a Century of Research.

Almost quarter of a century long studies aimed at identification, isolation, culturing, and use of postnatal pluripotent cells for the development of cell-based technologies have not met with success and failed to provide reliable and reproducible protocols of cell isolation, identification, and culturing. At the same time, experimental data in this field suggest that postnatal pluripotent cells are not the copies of embryonic cells and, therefore, the tests routinely used for identification of embryonic pluripotent cells are not fully adequate for characterization of their postnatal analogues. Therefore, cell lineage tracing methods showing the differentiation routes of the studied cells in human or animal body after birth should be developed and used.

The Possibility of Postmortem Magnetic Resonance Imaging for the Diagnostics of Lung Hypoplasia.

We explored the possibility of using postmortem MRI for the diagnostics of lung hypoplasia associated with innate diaphragmatic hernia in neonates. The main experimental group consisted of 17 newborns with innate diaphragmatic hernia including 10 non-operated newborns and 7 newborns died after surgery for innate diaphragmatic hernia. It was demonstrated that postmortem MRI allows objective quantitative assessment of the absolute and relative dimensions of the lungs in the thoracic cavity and thereby reveals their hypoplasia, which contributes to the determination of tanatogenesis.