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Biotech / Medical : STEM -- StemCells, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tom pope who wrote (515)	8/23/2000 11:38:33 AM
From: scaram(o)uche	Respond to of 805

Guess we should get the name of this thread corrected, huh? Scrap CytoTherapeutics? <g> I still feel, when traders go picking for the critical plays in stem cell research, that they're missing the first fundamental observation in stem cell transcription factors...... Stem Cell Sciences, PTY. The play, if there is one, is BTRN.

To: tom pope who wrote (515)	8/23/2000 11:50:47 AM
From: scaram(o)uche	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 805

Tom: Here' the BTRN-related work (patent to SCS, PTY.). My daughter gets back from a summer in Japan today, and I'm outta here. Won't be able to do further pointing today...... Nat Genet 2000 Apr;24(4):372-6 Quantitative expression of Oct-3/4 defines differentiation, dedifferentiation or self-renewal of ES cells. Niwa H, Miyazaki J, Smith AG Centre for Genome Research, The University of Edinburgh, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, UK. Cell fate during development is defined by transcription factors that act as molecular switches to activate or repress specific gene expression programmes. The POU transcription factor Oct-3/4 (encoded by Pou5f1) is a candidate regulator in pluripotent and germline cells and is essential for the initial formation of a pluripotent founder cell population in the mammalian embryo. Here we use conditional expression and repression in embryonic stem (ES) cells to determine requirements for Oct-3/4 in the maintenance of developmental potency. Although transcriptional determination has usually been considered as a binary on-off control system, we found that the precise level of Oct-3/4 governs three distinct fates of ES cells. A less than twofold increase in expression causes differentiation into primitive endoderm and mesoderm. In contrast, repression of Oct-3/4 induces loss of pluripotency and dedifferentiation to trophectoderm. Thus a critical amount of Oct-3/4 is required to sustain stem-cell self-renewal, and up- or downregulation induce divergent developmental programmes. Our findings establish a role for Oct-3/4 as a master regulator of pluripotency that controls lineage commitment and illustrate the sophistication of critical transcriptional regulators and the consequent importance of quantitative analyses.