A more astonishing hypothesis

McKay, Ron

doi:10.1038/nbt0502-426

Commentary
Published: 01 May 2002

A more astonishing hypothesis

Ron McKay¹

Nature Biotechnology volume 20, pages 426–427 (2002)Cite this article

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Two recent papers in Nature^1,2 indicate that somatic stem cells can fuse with embryonic stem (ES) cells and that the hybrid cells retain the ability to differentiate toward many fates. Does cell fusion explain all the differentiation properties of somatic stem cells? I would argue that somatic stem cells may differentiate to surprising new fates, and that the cell fusion data are extraordinarily interesting in their own right.

There has been enormous interest recently in the idea that cells can adopt fates distinct from those of their tissue of origin. The two Nature papers^1,2 now report that brain cells and bone marrow cells can fuse with ES cells to make polyploid products. Although this is no great surprise, in both cases the cells also retained the ability to differentiate into multiple fates. Most strikingly, Austin Smith's group in Edinburgh reports a chimeric mouse in which the fused cells contributed to coat color (a classic genetic trait that may start you thinking about the expression of dominant and recessive coat-color genes in the fused cells) and also to internal organs¹. Both papers (to quote the second, by Terada et al.) are phrased as “a warning to the overzealous trend in stem cell research to conclude transdifferentiation or dedifferentiation of cells without careful examination of genotypes”².

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