Pluripotency articles from across Nature Portfolio

The protocol presents for an optimized culture system for deriving porcine expanded potential stem cells from preimplantation embryos and reprogrammed somatic cells, and for validation and characterization.

Stem cell quiescence is generally considered as an inactive state with poised potential. Here, Khoa et al. find that quiescent embryonic stem cells actively maintain a dynamic reservoir of cells with unrestricted cell fate that converges on S-adenosylmethionine and H3K27me3 status.

Here the authors report that TFAP2C and NR5A2, two TF lineage regulators, activate both inner cell mass and trophectoderm programs in totipotent mouse embryos, leading to ‘bipotency activation’ to initiate the first cell-fate specification.

van der Weijden et al. perform genomic, proteomic and metabolic analyses and find that FOXO1-mediated fatty acid oxidation maintains mouse embryos in diapause.

Here, using cryo-electron microscopy and functional assays in mouse oocytes and embryos, the authors delineate the composition of the subcortical maternal complex, showing that clinical variants associated with female reproductive diseases disrupt complex formation.

Totipotency is the absence of any developmental restriction, a feature naturally found in the early embryo right after fertilization. Generating an in vitro totipotent stem cell model is not a trivial task. For this reason, a set of stringent criteria for the identification of bona fide totipotent stem cells have been proposed.

Planaria are a group of worms within the phylum Platyhelminthes (flatworms). Many species, including Schmidtea mediterranea, have the ability to regenerate their body from small pieces of tissue and are easy to keep in the laboratory, which makes them a prime model system for studying whole-body regeneration.

Recent developments in the field of planarian stem cell research are discussed, an active and accessible stem cell system that can generate any cell type of the planarian body, to address the question of pluripotency among neoblasts.