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Twenty Years of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in Farm Animals
Author(s) -
Blomberg LA,
Telugu BPVL
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
reproduction in domestic animals
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.546
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1439-0531
pISSN - 0936-6768
DOI - 10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02059.x
Subject(s) - embryonic stem cell , induced pluripotent stem cell , biology , stem cell , conceptus , microbiology and biotechnology , somatic cell , germ layer , embryo , kosr , somatic cell nuclear transfer , immunology , genetics , blastocyst , embryogenesis , gene , fetus , pregnancy
Contents Notable distinctions between an embryonic stem cell (ESC) and somatic cell are that an ESC can maintain an undifferentiated state indefinitely, self‐renew, and is pluripotent, meaning that the ESC can potentially generate cells representing all the three primordial germ layers and contribute to the terminally differentiated cells of a conceptus. These attributes make the ESC an ideal source for genome editing for both agricultural and biomedical applications. Although, ESC lines have been successfully established from rodents and primates, authentic ungulate stem cell lines on the contrary are still not available. Outstanding issues including but not limited to differences in pluripotency characteristics among the existing ESC lines, pre‐implantation embryo development, pluripotency pathways, and culture conditions plague our efforts to establish authentic ESC lines from farm animals. In this review, we highlight some of these issues and discuss how the recent derivation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) might augur the establishment of robust authentic ESC lines from farm animals.