The team's findings may also be relevant to inflammatory disorders that affect other parts of the body, such as the linings of the gut and bowel, which, like the skin, are replenished
by epithelial stem cells.
Not exact matches
Starting with procedures other research teams had previously worked out to convert iPSCs into keratinocytes, Xu's team demonstrated that
by carefully controlling the timing of the growth factors the
cells received, they could force the iPSCs to generate large numbers of
epithelial stem cells.
This shows hair shafts (arrows) formed
by induced pluripotent
stem cell - derived
epithelial stem cells.
Subsequent studies, as reviewed
by Daniels et al. [11] and Lavker and Sun [12] showed that some
cells located in the anterior limbus are
stem cells which partially differentiate into transient amplifying
cells while migrating centrally into the posterior
epithelial layer of the cornea.
These
epithelial organoid cultures are genetically and phenotypically extremely stable, allowing transplantation of the cultured offspring of a single
stem cell, as well as disease modeling
by growing organoids directly from diseased patient tissues (45).