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A decade of questions about the fluidity of cell identity

A method for directly converting connective-tissue cells into neurons opened up a new branch of research into cell-based therapies and called into question long-held beliefs about how development affects a cell’s identity.
  1. Giacomo Masserdotti

    1. Giacomo Masserdotti is in the Department of Physiological Genomics, Biomedical Center, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Munich 82152, Germany, and at the Institute for Stem Cell Research, Helmholtz Center Munich.

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  2. Magdalena Götz

    1. Magdalena Götz is in the Department of Physiological Genomics, Biomedical Center, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Munich 82152, Germany, and at the Institute for Stem Cell Research, Helmholtz Center Munich, and in the Excellence Cluster of Systems Neurology (SYNERGY), Munich, and is an external member of the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried.

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Our bodies rely on specialized cell types: brain cells compute information, red blood cells bind oxygen, and so on. Because almost all our cells have identical DNA, different patterns of gene and protein expression are needed to define these cell types. The selection and maintenance of these expression cascades were once thought to be irreversible after development. Over time, it emerged that cell identity could be changed, but it was often assumed that a cell could be converted into another cell type only if the two had a similar developmental origin. Ten years ago, Vierbuchen et al.1 overthrew this idea, by showing that connective-tissue cells called fibroblasts could be converted into functional neurons — which have a very different developmental origin — if they were engineered to express just three extra transcription factors.

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Nature 578, 522-524 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00479-6

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