细胞与细胞工程程序总汇.ppt

Pluripotent, embryonic stem cells originate as inner cell mass (ICM) cells within a blastocyst. These stem cells can become any tissue in the body, excluding a placenta. Only cells from an earlier stage of the embryo, known as the?morula, are totipotent, able to become all tissues in the body and the extraembryonic placenta. An embryonic stem cell comes from an organism at its earliest stages of development. When a sperm meets an egg and the resulting zygote begins to divide, each cell holds the potential to become any cell type in the body. This is the essence of pluripotency. Once an embryo has developed into a mature organism, most cells have undergone differentiation, but some cells are special. Unlike most adult cells, they retain the ability to multiply and become other types of cell. These adult stem cells reside in special stem-cell niches, regions of certain tissues where they wait for cues from the organism to replace or repair tissue. They are usually found in tissues that must continuously replenish themselves, such as the blood, the skin and the gut. But they have also been found in the brain, which replaces its cells much less frequently. These adult stem cells are said to be multipotent — unlike pluripotent cells, they cannot turn into any one of the 220 cell types in the human body. Neural stem cells in the brain can differentiate into several kinds of brain cell but could not become liver cells, for example. Not until the cells divide a few times do they start to lean towards one fate or another, expressing genes specific to one cell type. This process is called differentiation. 最早的人类多能干细胞是从体外受精的临床病例中得来的多余胚泡。这个里程碑式的事件是James Thomson领导的University of Wisconsin, Madison的实验室在1998年的成果。 The main objections are based on peoples cultural and religious beliefs. Catholics and some conservative Protestants, for example, oppose stem-cell research because they believe that human life starts at conception, making it unethical to destroy a zygote or