You may already be familiar with stem cells' uses for medical purposes. Stem cells are known to have the capacity to grow to become any kind of cells in a human body. They may be used to treat brain damage and diseases like diabetes and heart failure. The idea is to flood the target area accordingly with the "ripe" stem cells that have previously been selected and grown in the lab, and let these cells grow to be the cells of the designated area.
However, an innovation has been made recently by the University of Cambridge and Weizmann Institute on how to further manipulate human embryonic stem cells. After doing preliminary researcg on rats, they recently have claimed to have successfully created primitive cells called Primordial Germ Cells (PGC) from human embryonic stem cells, the ones that have the potential to develop into eggs and sperm, where all genetic information is written.
Right after fertilization (conducted in the lab), the egg will divide into a group of cells called blastocyst. Some cells develop into the inner cell mass which later will become a fetus and some develop into the outer wall which becomes the placenta. Cells in the inner cell mass are manipulated. Most will develop into stem cells and only a few cells will later on become Primordial Germ Cells (PGC), which was known only recently.
"The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development," says the first author of the paper from the Welcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Naoko Irie. "It's a stage we've managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells. It has highlighted important differences between embryo development in humans and rodents that may mean findings in mice and rats may not be directly extrapolated to humans.
The implications of the research are better understandings of human infertility, germ cell tumors and also the epigenetic inheritance, meaning a person's genes can actually be affected by his/her habit through the methylation process.
