Scientists explore how females shut off their second X chromosome

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and Institut Curie in Paris have shown that the protein SPEN plays a crucial role in the process of X-chromosome inactivation, whereby female mammalian ...

A simple twist of cell fate

How do a couple of universally expressed proteins in stem cells and developing embryos influence an individual cell's ultimate fate—whether it ultimately becomes, for example, a retinal cell, a heart muscle cell, or a stomach ...

New ways to generate totipotent-like cells

Totipotency is set to become a key tool for research and future medical applications. Finding efficient ways to generate totipotent-like cells is therefore crucial. In a new study, a group of researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum ...

Silencing retroviruses to awaken cell potential

Embryonic stem cells have the potential to differentiate into any type of cell in the human body. Once differentiated though, the newly minted somatic cells live out the rest of their days as that specific cell type and never ...

RNA regulation is crucial for embryonic stem cell differentiation

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are distinguished by their dual ability to self-renew and their potential to differentiate, both of which require tight regulatory control. During the differentiation of ESCs, various cells develop ...

Research identifies earlier origin of neural crest cells

Neural crest cells—embryonic cells in vertebrates that travel throughout the body and generate many cell types—have been thought to originate in the ectoderm, the outermost of the three germ layers formed in the earliest ...

How chromosomes change their shape during cell differentiation

The human genome is made up of 46 chromosomes, each of which has a length of about 100 to 200 million base pairs, the building blocks of the DNA double helix. Even during interphase, the period in between the cell division ...

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