Articles

Diverse biological and engineering strategies towards organ regeneration

Organ regeneration is an important, fascinating, and old topic while much remains unknown in spite of extensive investigations for decades. From March 25th to 27th, 2021, the Third Chinese Symposium on Organ R...

Authors: Junjie Hou, Qinchao Zhou, Xiaojun Zhu, Jinrong Peng and Jing-Wei Xiong

Single-cell analysis defines the lineage plasticity of stem cells in cervix epithelium

Information about the dynamic change and post-injury regeneration of cervical epithelium is relatively rare, even though it is tightly related to gynecologic malignancy. Here, using a feeder cell-based culturi...

Authors: Zixian Zhao, Yujia Wang, Yingchuan Wu, Dandan Li, Ting Zhang, Yu Ma, Xiaoming Teng and Wei Zuo

Retinal organoids as models for development and diseases

The evolution of pluripotent stem cell-derived retinal organoids (ROs) has brought remarkable opportunities for developmental studies while also presenting new therapeutic avenues for retinal diseases. With a ...

Authors: Xiao Zhang, Wen Wang and Zi-Bing Jin

Correction to: CRISPR/Cas: a potential gene-editing tool in the nervous system

Authors: Yanxia Gao, Kexin Gao and Hui Yang

Establishment of porcine and monkey colonic organoids for drug toxicity study

Pig and monkey are widely used models for exploration of human diseases and evaluation of drug efficiency and toxicity, but high cost limits their uses. Organoids have been shown to be promising models for dru...

Authors: Haonan Li, Yalong Wang, Mengxian Zhang, Hong Wang, Along Cui, Jianguo Zhao, Weizhi Ji and Ye-Guang Chen

Master regulators of skeletal muscle lineage development and pluripotent stem cells differentiation

In vertebrates, the skeletal muscles of the body and their associated stem cells originate from muscle progenitor cells, during development. The specification of the muscles of the trunk, head and limbs, relie...

Authors: Joana Esteves de Lima and Frédéric Relaix

Coordination of EZH2 and SOX2 specifies human neural fate decision

Polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs) are essential in mouse gastrulation and specify neural ectoderm in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), but the underlying molecular basis remains unclear. Here in this stud...

Authors: Yuan Zhao, Tianyu Wang, Yanqi Zhang, Liang Shi, Cong Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiao Yao, Qianyu Chen, Xiaofen Zhong, Yanxing Wei, Yongli Shan and Guangjin Pan

Deciphering and reconstitution of positional information in the human brain development

Organoid has become a novel in vitro model to research human development and relevant disorders in recent years. With many improvements on the culture protocols, current brain organoids could self-organize int...

Authors: Yi-Fan Wang, Cong Liu and Peng-Fei Xu

The truth lies somewhere in the middle: the cells responsible for liver tissue maintenance finally identified

Authors: Tohru Itoh

Emerging liver organoid platforms and technologies

Building human organs in a dish has been a long term goal of researchers in pursue of physiologically relevant models of human disease and for replacement of worn out and diseased organs. The liver has been an...

Authors: Do Thuy Uyen Ha Lam, Yock Young Dan, Yun-Shen Chan and Huck-Hui Ng

Scaffold strategies combined with mesenchymal stem cells in vaginal construction: a review

Tissue engineering has provided new treatment alternatives for tissue reconstruction. Advances in the tissue engineering field have resulted in mechanical support and biological substitutes to restore, maintai...

Authors: Nicole Andréa Corbellini Henckes, Dalana Faleiro, Laura Chao Chuang and Elizabeth Obino Cirne-Lima

Role of PTEN-less in cardiac injury, hypertrophy and regeneration

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. Cardiomyocytes are capable of coordinated contractions, which are mainly responsible for pumping blood. When cardiac stress occurs, cardiomyocy...

Authors: Tian Liang, Feng Gao and Jinghai Chen

Single cells and transposable element heterogeneity in stem cells and development

Recent innovations in single cell sequencing-based technologies are shining a light on the heterogeneity of cellular populations in unprecedented detail. However, several cellular aspects are currently underut...

Authors: Andrew P. Hutchins

Stem/progenitor cells in fetuses and newborns: overview of immunohistochemical markers

Microanatomy of the vast majority of human organs at birth is characterized by marked differences as compared to adult organs, regarding their architecture and the cell types detectable at histology. In preter...

Authors: D. Fanni, C. Gerosa, C. Loddo, M. Castagnola, V. Fanos, M. Zaffanello and G. Faa

Forkhead box family transcription factors as versatile regulators for cellular reprogramming to pluripotency

Forkhead box (Fox) transcription factors play important roles in mammalian development and disease. However, their function in mouse somatic cell reprogramming remains unclear. Here, we report that FoxD subfam...

Authors: Meijun Fu, Huan Chen, Zepo Cai, Yihang Yang, Ziyu Feng, Mengying Zeng, Lijun Chen, Yue Qin, Baomei Cai, Pinghui Zhu, Chunhua Zhou, Shengyong Yu, Jing Guo, Jing Liu, Shangtao Cao and Duanqing Pei

MRISCs protect colonic stem cells from inflammatory damage

Increasing evidence suggest functional roles of subepithelial mesenchymal niche cells in maintaining intestinal stem cells and in modulating the pathogenesis of various intestinal diseases in mammals. A recent...

Authors: Guoli Zhu and Rongwen Xi

In vivo imaging reveals mature Oligodendrocyte division in adult Zebrafish

Whether mature oligodendrocytes (mOLs) participate in remyelination has been disputed for several decades. Recently, some studies have shown that mOLs participate in remyelination by producing new sheaths. How...

Authors: Suqi Zou and Bing Hu

miRNA in cardiac development and regeneration

Ischemic heart disease is one of the main causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. In adult mammalian hearts, most cardiomyocytes are terminally differentiated and have extremely limited capacity of pro...

Authors: Zhaohui Ouyang and Ke Wei

Breakthrough of interspecific chimerism: blocking apoptosis

On January 28 in Nature online, Zheng et al. (Nature, 2021 (Online ahead of print)) reported that they developed an ingenious method of interspecies PSC co-culture system in vitro which unfolded interspecific ...

Authors: Yiren Qin and Duancheng Wen

Activation of the Melanocortin-4 receptor signaling by α-MSH stimulates nerve-dependent mouse digit regeneration

Expression of Mc4r in peripheral organs indicates it has broader roles in organ homeostasis and regeneration. However, the expression and function of Mc4r in the mouse limb and digit has not been fully investi...

Authors: Hanqian Xu, Hailin Zhang, Yanqing Fang, Huiran Yang, Ying Chen, Chao Zhang and Gufa Lin

Defining cell identity beyond the premise of differential gene expression

Identifying genes that define cell identity is a requisite step for characterising cell types and cell states and predicting cell fate choices. By far, the most widely used approach for this task is based on d...

Authors: Hani Jieun Kim, Patrick P. L. Tam and Pengyi Yang

Organoid: a powerful tool to study lung regeneration and disease

Organoids are three-dimensional self-organizing structures formed by adult tissue stem cells or pluripotent stem cells. They recapitulate cell-cell, cell-niche interactions in tissue development, homeostasis, ...

Authors: Tiantian Lu, Yiyuan Cao, Peng Zhao, Shengxi Shen and Ying Xi

Molecular regulation of myocardial proliferation and regeneration

Heart regeneration is a fascinating and complex biological process. Decades of intensive studies have revealed a sophisticated molecular network regulating cardiac regeneration in the zebrafish and neonatal mo...

Authors: Lixia Zheng, Jianyong Du, Zihao Wang, Qinchao Zhou, Xiaojun Zhu and Jing-Wei Xiong

The engine initiating tissue regeneration: does a common mechanism exist during evolution?

A successful tissue regeneration is a very complex process that requires a precise coordination of many molecular, cellular and physiological events. One of the critical steps is to convert the injury signals ...

Authors: Yanmei Liu, Wilson Pak-Kin Lou and Ji-Feng Fei

The interaction of Notch and Wnt signaling pathways in vertebrate regeneration

Regeneration is an evolutionarily conserved process in animal kingdoms, however, the regenerative capacities differ from species and organ/tissues. Mammals possess very limited regenerative potential to replac...

Authors: Junying Gao, Lixia Fan, Long Zhao and Ying Su

Canonical and early lineage-specific stem cell types identified in planarian SirNeoblasts

The pluripotent stem cells in planarians, a model for tissue and cellular regeneration, remain further identification. We recently developed a method to enrich piwi-1+ cells in Schmidtea mediterranea, by staining...

Authors: Kaimeng Niu, Hao Xu, Yuanyi Zhou Xiong, Yun Zhao, Chong Gao, Chris W. Seidel, Xue Pan, Yuqing Ying and Kai Lei

RhoA/Rock activation represents a new mechanism for inactivating Wnt/β-catenin signaling in the aging-associated bone loss

The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway appears to be particularly important for bone homeostasis, whereas nuclear accumulation of β-catenin requires the activation of Rac1, a member of the Rho small GTPase family...

Authors: Wei Shi, Chengyun Xu, Ying Gong, Jirong Wang, Qianlei Ren, Ziyi Yan, Liu Mei, Chao Tang, Xing Ji, Xinhua Hu, Meiyu Qv, Musaddique Hussain, Ling-Hui Zeng and Ximei Wu

Proteins in DNA methylation and their role in neural stem cell proliferation and differentiation

Epigenetic modifications, namely non-coding RNAs, DNA methylation, and histone modifications such as methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation, ubiquitylation, and sumoylation play a significant role in brain ...

Authors: Jiaqi Sun, Junzheng Yang, Xiaoli Miao, Horace H. Loh, Duanqing Pei and Hui Zheng

Vertebrate cardiac regeneration: evolutionary and developmental perspectives

Cardiac regeneration is an ancestral trait in vertebrates that is lost both as more recent vertebrate lineages evolved to adapt to new environments and selective pressures, and as members of certain species de...

Authors: Stephen Cutie and Guo N. Huang

From wound response to repair – lessons from C. elegans

As a result of evolution, the ability to repair wounds allows organisms to combat environment insults. Although the general process of wound healing at the tissue level has been described for decades, the deta...

Authors: Yicong Ma, Jing Xie, Chandra Sugiarto Wijaya and Suhong Xu

Cardiac cell type-specific responses to injury and contributions to heart regeneration

Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Due to the limited proliferation rate of mature cardiomyocytes, adult mammalian hearts are unable to regenerate damaged cardiac muscle following injur...

Authors: Weijia Zhang, Jinxiu Liang and Peidong Han

The roles and activation of endocardial Notch signaling in heart regeneration

As a highly conserved signaling pathway in metazoans, the Notch pathway plays important roles in embryonic development and tissue regeneration. Recently, cardiac injury and regeneration have become an increasi...

Authors: Huicong Li, Cheng Chang, Xueyu Li and Ruilin Zhang

Understanding embryonic development at single-cell resolution

Authors: Mengmeng Jiang, Xue Xu and Guoji Guo

Overexpression of HOXA9 upregulates NF-κB signaling to promote human hematopoiesis and alter the hematopoietic differentiation potentials

The HOX genes are master regulators of embryogenesis that are also involved in hematopoiesis. HOXA9 belongs to a cluster of HOX genes that play extensively studied roles in hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis.

Authors: Jiahui Zeng, Danying Yi, Wencui Sun, Yuanlin Liu, Jing Chang, Lijiao Zhu, Yonggang Zhang, Xu Pan, Yong Dong, Ya Zhou, Mowen Lai, Guohui Bian, Qiongxiu Zhou, Jiaxin Liu, Bo Chen and Feng Ma

All routes lead to Rome: multifaceted origin of hepatocytes during liver regeneration

Liver is the largest internal organ that serves as the key site for various metabolic activities and maintenance of homeostasis. Liver diseases are great threats to human health. The capability of liver to reg...

Authors: Ce Gao and Jinrong Peng

The cellular niche for intestinal stem cells: a team effort

The rapidly self-renewing epithelium in the mammalian intestine is maintained by multipotent intestinal stem cells (ISCs) located at the bottom of the intestinal crypt that are interspersed with Paneth cells i...

Authors: Guoli Zhu, Jiulong Hu and Rongwen Xi

Evolutionary insights into heart regeneration

Some lower vertebrates such as zebrafish and axolotl have incredible cardiac regenerative potential while mammals have very limited ones. Comparative studies among species have revealed that cardiomyocyte poly...

Authors: Jing-Wei Xiong

Mesenchymal stem cell as a novel approach to systemic sclerosis; current status and future perspectives

Systemic sclerosis is a rare chronic autoimmune disease with extensive microvascular injury, damage of endothelial cells, activation of immune responses, and progression of tissue fibrosis in the skin and vari...

Authors: Mina Abedi, Sepideh Alavi-Moghadam, Moloud Payab, Parisa Goodarzi, Fereshteh Mohamadi-jahani, Forough Azam Sayahpour, Bagher Larijani and Babak Arjmand

Protein quality control of cell stemness

Protein quality control (PQC) systems play essential roles in the recognition, refolding and clearance of aberrant proteins, thus ensuring cellular protein homeostasis, or proteostasis. Especially, continued p...

Authors: Pengze Yan, Jie Ren, Weiqi Zhang, Jing Qu and Guang-Hui Liu

Organoid based personalized medicine: from bench to bedside

Three-dimensional cultured organoids have become a powerful in vitro research tool that preserves genetic, phenotypic and behavioral trait of in vivo organs, which can be established from both pluripotent stem ce...

Authors: Yaqi Li, Peiyuan Tang, Sanjun Cai, Junjie Peng and Guoqiang Hua

Combined application of CRISPR-Cas and stem cells for clinical and basic research

Authors: Meng Yan and Jinsong Li

Immunomodulatory and Antioxidative potentials of adipose-derived Mesenchymal stem cells isolated from breast versus abdominal tissue: a comparative study

Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) are considered ideal candidates for both research and cellular therapy due to ease of access, large yield, feasibility, and efficacy in preclinical and clinical studies. Unlik...

Authors: Nourhan Abu-Shahba, Marwa Mahmoud, Mazen Abdel-Rasheed, Yasmine Darwish, Ahmad AbdelKhaliq, Eman Mohammed, Mahmoud ElHefnawi and Osama Azmy

Positive feedback between retinoic acid and 2-phospho-L-ascorbic acid trisodium salt during somatic cell reprogramming

Retinoic acid (RA) and 2-phospho-L-ascorbic acid trisodium salt (AscPNa) promote the reprogramming of mouse embryonic fibroblasts to induced pluripotent stem cells. In the current studies, the lower abilities ...

Authors: Mengdan Zhang, Qian Li, Tingting Yang, Fei Meng, Xiaowei Lai, Lining Liang, Changpeng Li, Hao Sun, Jiaqi Sun and Hui Zheng

Erastin-induced ferroptosis is a regulator for the growth and function of human pancreatic islet-like cell clusters

Ferroptosis is a newly identified and novel form of cell death, which is characterized by an iron- and reactive oxygen species (ROS)-dependent manner. Potential utility of ferroptotic cell death has been recen...

Authors: Xing Yu Li and Po Sing Leung

Consistent apparent Young’s modulus of human embryonic stem cells and derived cell types stabilized by substrate stiffness regulation promotes lineage specificity maintenance

Apparent Young’s modulus (AYM), which reflects the fundamental mechanical property of live cells measured by atomic force microscopy and is determined by substrate stiffness regulated cytoskeletal organization...

Authors: Anqi Guo, Bingjie Wang, Cheng Lyu, Wenjing Li, Yaozu Wu, Lu Zhu, Ran Bi, Chenyu Huang, Jiao Jiao Li and Yanan Du

Intestinal epithelial plasticity and regeneration via cell dedifferentiation

The intestinal epithelium possesses a great capacity of self-renewal under normal homeostatic conditions and of regeneration upon damages. The renewal and regenerative processes are driven by intestinal stem c...

Authors: Yuan Liu and Ye-Guang Chen

Comparative characterization and osteogenic / adipogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells derived from male rat hair follicles and bone marrow

Clinical applications of cell therapy and tissue regeneration under different conditions need a multiplicity of adult stem cell sources. Up to date, little is available on the comparative isolation, characteri...

Authors: Abdel Kader A. Zaki, Tariq I. Almundarij and Faten A. M. Abo-Aziza

CRISPR/Cas: a potential gene-editing tool in the nervous system

The rapidly developmental RNA-guided CRISPR/Cas system is a powerful tool for RNA and DNA editing in a variety of cells from different species and makes a great contribution to gene function research, disease ...

Authors: Yanxia Gao, Kexin Gao and Hui Yang

Mapping a mammalian adult adrenal gland hierarchy across species by microwell-seq

Recently, single-cell RNA-seq technologies have been rapidly updated, leading to a revolution in biology. We previously developed Microwell-seq, a cost-effective and high-throughput single cell RNA sequencing(...

Authors: Shujing Lai, Lifeng Ma, Weigao E, Fang Ye, Haide Chen, Xiaoping Han and Guoji Guo

Comparison of Scanpy-based algorithms to remove the batch effect from single-cell RNA-seq data

With the development of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology, analysts need to integrate hundreds of thousands of cells with multiple experimental batches. It is becoming increasingly difficult fo...

Authors: Jiaqi Li, Chengxuan Yu, Lifeng Ma, Jingjing Wang and Guoji Guo