Related topics: stem cells · blood cells · leukemia · bone marrow

Study uncovers the secret of long-lived stem cells

Nothing lives forever, but compared to other cells in the body, hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are remarkably long-lived. HSCs are blood-forming cells—they give rise to rapidly dividing progenitor cells, which in turn ...

Hematopoietic stem cell

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are multipotent stem cells that give rise to all the blood cell types including myeloid (monocytes and macrophages, neutrophils, basophils, eosinophils, erythrocytes, megakaryocytes/platelets, dendritic cells), and lymphoid lineages (T-cells, B-cells, NK-cells). The definition of hematopoietic stem cells has undergone considerable revision in the last two decades. The hematopoietic tissue contains cells with long-term and short-term regeneration capacities and committed multipotent, oligopotent, and unipotent progenitors. Recently, long-term transplantation experiments point toward a clonal diversity model of hematopoietic stem cells. Here, the HSC compartment consists of a fixed number of different types of HSC, each with epigenetically preprogrammed behavior. This contradicts older models of HSC behavior, which postulated a single type of HSC that can be continuously molded into different subtypes of HSCs. HSCs constitute 1:10.000 of cells in myeloid tissue.

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