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Developmental biology

Transdifferentiation under scrutiny

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 3, page 321 (2002)Cite this article

Recent studies have shown that bone marrow and neural stem cells can acquire new and unexpected fates. In the most striking example, mouse neural stem cells were shown to form all three germ layers of an embryo when injected into blastocysts. Prompted by these remarkable data, the two groups sought to identify the molecules that are responsible for reprogramming the adult stem cells to acquire these new lineages. One team grew ES cells with neural stem cells and the other with bone marrow cells; however, unlike in earlier studies, they followed the individual fates of the adult stem cells and the ES cells using specific genetic markers. After several weeks of co-culture and selection, a new population of cells emerged that carried the genetic markers of the adult stem cells but that resembled ES cells. Ying et al. showed that the cells proliferated under ES-cell culture conditions, and expressed the ES-cell markers Oct4 and Sox2 . The cells were pluripotent, forming embryoid bodies that contain different tissues, and contributed to all three germ layers after injection into a mouse blastocyst. Terada et al. observed that the bone marrow cells that had fused with ES cells also became pluripotent and, when injected into adult mouse, formed tumours that contain cell types derived from all three germ layers.

To their surprise, both groups found that the 'transdifferentiated' cells carried markers for both the ES cells and the adult cells. In addition, the cells were tetraploid. It therefore seemed that, rather than transdifferentiating, the adult stem cells had spontaneously fused with the ES cells and adopted their characteristics, raising the possibility that cell fusion could explain earlier reports of transdifferentiation.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Terada, N. et al. Bone marrow cells adopt the phenotype of other cells by spontaneous cell fusion. Nature 416, 542–545 (2002)

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  2. Ying, Q.-L. et al. Changing potency by spontaneous fusion. Nature 416, 545–548 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

FURTHER READING

  1. Wurmser, A. E. & Gage, R. H. Transdifferentiation or cell fusion: stem cell confusion. Nature 416, 485–487 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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  1. Senior Editor, Nature,

    Natalie DeWitt

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  1. Natalie DeWitt
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DeWitt, N. Transdifferentiation under scrutiny. Nat Rev Genet 3, 321 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg811

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