Imagine repairing damaged tissue in your body. Stem cells have the potential to produce cells of many organs, and that's what stem cell research is trying to accomplish.
Stem cells follow a path in order to form an organ in an embryo. It has been difficult to get cells in the lab. They may have overlooked an important step and missed another type of stem cells according to a new study.
Stem cells can be used to make a gut in a dish. We have found a way to follow different parts of the embryo's development. A student at Martin Proks is one of the primary authors of the study that describes the intermediate stage that different types of stem cells could use to make the gut and other organs.
There are two types of stem cells: pluripotent stem cells and extra-embryonic stem cells. A couple of years ago, a research team described a new stem cell line. They are important support cells that help the gut organs by providing food and water.
An alternative route that extra-embryonic cells can use to make organs in the embryo has been identified by the group leader. We took our extra-embryonic endoderm stem cells and turned them into structures that looked like organs.
People used to think these cells helped the embryo to develop and then they vanished. They don't have something to do with your body. In this paper, we discovered that if we steer these support cells through this new route, they would form organoid structures.
Laboratory grown cells might be improved.
The researchers used a genetic marker to identify all the potential cells that could be used to create organs in the tricyle. This big data is hard to analyze and requires innovative new approaches to analysis that were developed in collaboration with physical scientists.
The genes being used in these cells were identified by us. In order to facilitate this work, we developed a new tool to compare clusters of cells and used it to compare cells within our own dataset.
The researchers wanted to know if the alternative route could lead to organ cell types in the lab. These stem cells, which were described earlier in the article, originate from a different part of the embryo than the pluripotent stem cells.
Stem cells were used to make structures in a dish. It seems that both routes could work. One of the principle authors on the study says that using the alternative route might help laboratory grown cells form functional cells.
Scientists have been trying to crack the code on how to develop stem cells into the correct cells needed for a specific treatment, or to test drugs or model a disease.
We have problems maturing these cells because we haven't gotten there. "Maybe we can solve some of these problems by combining the alternative route with the traditional route," says Joshua Brickman at re NEW.
More information: Michaela Mrugala Rothová et al, Identification of the central intermediate in the extra-embryonic to embryonic endoderm transition through single-cell transcriptomics, Nature Cell Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41556-022-00923-x Journal information: Nature Cell Biology
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