Stem Cells
Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew for a prolonged time and still maintain the ability to differentiate along one or more cell lineages. Stem cells may be unipotent, multipotent, or pluripotent, meaning they can differentiate into one, multiple, or all cell types, respectively. Pluripotent stem cells can become cells derived from any of the three embryonic germ layers. Stem cells have the advantage over glial cells because they are able to proliferate more easily in culture. However, it remains difficult to preferentially differentiate these cells into varied cell types in an ordered manner. Another difficulty with stem cells is the lack of a well-defined definition of stem cells beyond hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Each stem cell 'type' has more than one method for identifying, isolating, and expanding the cells; this has caused much confusion because all stem cells of a 'type' (neural, mesenchymal, retinal) do not necessarily behave in the same manner under identical conditions.
Read more about this topic: Nerve Guidance Conduit, Cellular Therapies
Famous quotes containing the words stem and/or cells:
“The melon is growing but its stem is shriveling.”
—Russian popular saying, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)