Going uphill: Inducing Pluripotency

Below you will find a brief review on the induction of pluripotency in eukariotic multicellular organisms, concentrating mainly on the general principles of historical methods which ultimately give rise to current methods. Follow this link for full text.

Going uphill:Inducing Pluripotency
By, Ben Laffin

Abstract:

From the idealized epigenetic landscape of C.H. Waddington to the modern use of epigenetic regulatory factors, the ability to revert a cell to a pluripotent state has been a dream of biologists for nearly seventy years. In that time we have come to discover a great deal about histone regulation, chromatin remodeling, and the factors that control it and how to control them. Early activities in inducing pluripotency involved the painstaking removal of nuclear information and replacement from a donor cell, creating largely unhealthy, vaguely multipotent lines. Eventually entire mammals could be reproduced from an adult genome. In more modern examples, factors responsible for the maintenance of multipotency in embryonic cell lines are able to be manipulated and combined in the presence of an adult genome so as to induce it into an earlier structural and chemical conformation. In this way, cells that had reached senescence may be able to be reactivated, in the activity of other lines; the power of such a tool in medical and laboratory settings would be incredible.

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A Review of Induced Pluripotency

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