Ann Arbor, MI (Scicasts) – How do stem cells preserve their
ability to become any type of cell in the body? And how do they
“decide” to give up that magical state and start specializing?
If researchers could answer these questions, our ability to
harness stem cells to treat disease could explode. Now, a
University of Michigan Medical School team has published a key
discovery that could help that goal become reality. In the
current issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, researcher Dr. Yali
Dou, and her team show the crucial role of a protein called Mof
in preserving the ‘stem-ness’ of stem cells, and priming them to
become specialized cells in mice. Their results show that Mof
plays a key role in the “epigenetics” of stem cells -- that is,
helping stem cells read and use their DNA. One of the key
questions in stem cell research is what keeps stem cells in a
kind of eternal youth, and then allows them to start “growing
up” to be a specific type of tissue. Dou, an associate professor
of pathology and biological ch