Editor's Summary
18 September 2008
Human stem cells: surfing the PluriNet
Hundreds of different human cell lines are grouped under the catch-all term 'stem cells'. They can be from embryos, fetuses or adults. And they can be pluripotent — able to produce a broad range of cells — or fated to produce a limited repertoire of cell types. Müller et al. set out to establish a 'stem cell diagnostic' to bring order to the characterization and classification of human stem cells, based on a database of transcriptional profiles derived from more than 150 cell samples. Bioinformatic analyses revealed that pluripotent stem cell lines share many properties and all possess a characteristic protein–protein network, dubbed 'PluriNet'. Other cell types, including brain-derived neural stem cell lines, are much more diverse. These results offer a new strategy for classifying stem cells and support the idea that pluripotency and self-renewal are under tight control by specific molecular networks.
Letter: Regulatory networks define phenotypic classes of human stem cell lines
Franz-Josef Müller, Louise C. Laurent, Dennis Kostka, Igor Ulitsky, Roy Williams, Christina Lu, In-Hyun Park, Mahendra S. Rao, Ron Shamir, Philip H. Schwartz, Nils O. Schmidt & Jeanne F. Loring
doi:10.1038/nature07213
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,490K) | Supplementary information
