MicroRNAs in Embryonic Stem Cells
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | Stem cell research began in the 1950s with the study of teratocarcinomas. Stevens and Little determined that these malignant germ-cell tumors comprise undifferentiated cell components (so-called embryonal carcinoma cells, or EC cells) that have the ability to form entirely new teratocarcinomas upon transplantation into experimental animals. In 1964, Lewis Kleinsmith and Barry Pierce demonstrated that a single EC cell is capable of multilineage differentiation as well as unlimited self-renewal—the two key characteristics of stem cells. Later, mouse EC cell lines that can be stably propagated in vitro were established, and several EC cell lines were shown to form chimeras upon injection into mouse blastocysts. Naturally, similar developmental properties of EC cells and early embryonic cells led to a search for a karyotypically stable counterpart of these cells. In the early 1980s, two groups simultaneously introduced the first pluripotent mouse embryonic stem cells to the scientific community. |
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