Induced neural stem cells generated from rat fibroblasts
Guangjun Xi1, Pingfang Hu, Cunye Qu
1Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, Department of Cell and Neurobiology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA; Department of Neurology, Wuxi People's Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi 214023, China.
Abstract:
The generation of induced tissue-specific stem cells has been hampered by the lack of well-established methods for the maintenance of pure tissue-specific stem cells like the ones we have for embryonic stem (ES) cell cultures. Using a cocktail of cytokines and small molecules, we demonstrate that primitive neural stem (NS) cells derived from mouse ES cells and rat embryos can be maintained. Furthermore, using the same set of cytokines and small molecules, we show that induced NS (iNS) cells can be generated from rat fibroblasts by forced expression of the transcriptional factors Oct4, Sox2 and c-Myc. The generation and long-term maintenance of iNS cells could have wide and momentous implications.
