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Embryonic stem cells without an egg or embryo

Researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., have manipulated mouse fibroblasts and turned them into cells with such developmental elasticity that they appear identical to embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells have potential to provide people with donor cells which can be used transplantation medicine, one of the problems of embryonic stem cells are they are derived from the embryo and it will not be compatible with immune system of the donor, so the real goal is to generate customized embryonic stem cells, A way that it thought to be accomplished was by nuclear transfer, for example If u take skin cell from a patient and introduce nucleus from the cells into a egg for whose nucleus is removed. The egg is able to reprogram the somatic cell into an embryonic state, from this people are able to isolate customized embryonic cells and those could be new for customized transplantation therapy, there will be no immune rejection.



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The problem with this approach is many, it is very complex and inefficient procedure and it only so far in animals (mice only) and secondly there lot of ethical objection in using human embryo and human egg cells for therapy or research, so goal of field is to understand how the egg accomplishes reprogramming the somatic nucleus into embryonic stage once we know the reprogramming rules we could do without the egg.

What we have done in our laboratory was to use the knowledge coming from investigating and finding of molecular circulatory of embryonic stem cells and comparing it with the somatic cells and taking some key regulators or Key switches and express those into the somatic cells .In long process (few weeks) we found that these skin cells become embryonic cells,. Signatures of the reprogrammed cells these cells were indistingusble with normal embryonic stem cells, Molecular expression pattern of the genes is identical, epigenetic stage of these cells are indistinguisable from embryonic stem cells the most important is these reprogrammed cells can do anything biologically as embryonic stem cells with same developmental potency and we tested this by introducing these cells back to embryos of form prim Eric mice and even can contribute to germline, so that it can generate fibroblast after the reprogramming process being introduced we can generate mice, from all,the test we have done ,it appears that these cells have same potential for forming all lineages of the animal but also for therapy has Embryonic stem cell have.

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