Purging and isolating pluripotent cells, 'sweet' dreams become true?

摘要

The formation of an adult organism could be viewed as a hierarchical process in which the initial totipotent cell,the zygote,progressively loses "potency" by differentiating into pluripotent,multipotent and unipotent states until the final terminally differentiated cells comprising tissues and organs are derived.Such a unidirectional concept trembled when four transcription factors were shown to "revert" the identity of differentiated somatic cells and reprogram them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) [1].