COURTESY RICARDO ROSSELLOThe ability to reprogram differentiated cells toward pluripotency has been a remarkable achievement, though its application has mostly been limited to mammals. Researchers published in eLife this week (September 3) evidence of induced pluripotency in cells from the non-mammalian model organisms zebra finch, chicken, zebrafish, and Drosophila. While the study’s authors cautioned that these cells were only partially reprogrammed, and therefore not induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), lead author Ricardo Rossello said that “they have a slew of phenotypic characteristics of stem cells.”
The University of Puerto Rico’s Rossello and his colleagues, who study vocalization in songbirds, had been looking for a way to gather stem cells from the animals. “But nobody has really quite isolated stem cells” from the zebra finch, he said. So they decided to try and create them. In humans and other mammals, the overexpression of four genes can turn a skin or some other specialized cell into a pluripotent stem cell.
Although homology to these genes was not great in the finch, Rossello said a portion of the genes’ proteins involved in transcriptional regulation, the DNA binding domains, were quite similar. So they went ahead and inserted a viral vector carrying the four mouse reprogramming factors into embryonic fibroblast cells from the songbird. ...
