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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 17 2018, @10:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the give-us-a-hand-mate dept.

Researchers have learned that precursor cells for skeletal muscles actually also give rise to neurons, blood vessels, blood cells and immune cells, pushing science one step closer to generating body parts in a laboratory.

Findings were published today in Scientific Reports.

Combining developmental biology, genetics and bioinformatics, scientists at Oregon State University confirmed that Pax3+ cells act as a multifaceted stem cell niche for multiple organs at embryonic stages.

"We now have the ability to label cells based on expression profiling of sequence-specific transcription factors," said corresponding author Chrissa Kioussi, professor in the OSU College of Pharmacy. "We can give a molecular code to each cell, to make it distinct in time and space -- during the progression of a cell the code changes. That's beautiful because now we can discover niches, stem cell pockets, and we can use this information to fix so many genetic or environmentally caused disorders. This gives us the possibility to make an entire cell lineage, or an entire organ, in a petri dish."

Using a mouse embryo model, Kioussi and collaborators in Oregon State's colleges of Veterinary Medicine and Engineering compared gene expression profiles of the Pax3+ cell population over several days. They isolated lineage-traced cells from forelimbs at different embryonic days and performed whole-transcriptome profiling via RNA sequencing.

"That let us identify genes involved in the skeletal, muscular, vascular, nervous and immune systems, all of which go into making a functional limb," Kioussi said. "Expression of genes related to the immune, skeletal and vascular systems showed big increases over time, which suggests Pax3+ cells give rise to more than muscles -- they're involved in patterning and the three-dimensional formation of the forelimb through multiple systems."

The research opens the potential to use stem cell pockets, for example, to grow a new arm or leg or other organ for someone who's lost a body part to accident or disease.


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  • (Score: 1) by chuckugly on Friday May 18 2018, @03:20PM

    by chuckugly (2910) on Friday May 18 2018, @03:20PM (#681190)

    I think this is going to be a hugely (no pun intended) profitable part (again...) of the growing custom organs and parts business in the future. No more silicone, ladies.