A new chemical cocktail that can transform cells into totipotent stem cells—the very beginning of life—has been created by researchers at Tsinghua University in China. These cells have the capacity to differentiate into any type of body cell, potentially obviating the requirement for sperm and eggs in the development of an organism.
The differentiation potential of stem cells is arranged in a branching hierarchy, therefore not all stem cells are created equal. Adults have several tissues that include multipotent stem cells, which have the ability to differentiate into a variety of cells specific to a given tissue or organ to aid in healing. Pluripotent stem cells, which are present in embryos and may grow into practically any form of cell in the body, are discovered earlier in the development tree.
On top of the food chain, however, are totipotent stem cells, which can differentiate into any type of body cell as well as supportive tissues like the placenta. They endure during the first few phases of life and serve as the first single cell to emerge from a fertilized egg, among other developmental milestones. When the body is developing, the cells continue to differentiate into pluripotent stem cells and then further specialize into all the cells.
Research into stem cell regenerative medicine is based on the ability of scientists to take adult cells and establish a pluripotent state in them. However, the Tsinghua researchers went a step farther in the most recent study, bringing pluripotent stem cells back to a totipotent condition for the first time.
Before identifying a specific combination of three compounds that appeared to induce totipotency in mouse pluripotent stem cells, the researchers first screened thousands of combinations of tiny molecules. The three compounds in their mixture—TTNPB, 1-Azakenpaullone, and WS6—were given the names TAW cocktail.
TAW cocktail-exposed cells were totipotent at all transcriptome, epigenome, and metabolome levels, according to molecular analysis. Numerous genes linked to totipotency were turned on, whilst those linked to pluripotency were turned off.
The team cultivated these cells in lab dishes and in live mouse embryos to examine how well they differentiated. Both times, the cells had totipotent stem cell characteristics, capable of differentiating into embryonic and extraembryonic (such as placental) cell lineages in living animals.
According to the scientists, this discovery may create a number of important new prospects. In the long run, scientists could be able to bypass the need for sperm and eggs and produce a viable organism directly from a mature cell. That might enable those who couldn’t normally have children to do so, or it might assist endangered animals being preserved. However, the researchers do admit that there will undoubtedly be ethical issues.
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