A New Way to Control Stem Cell Fate Using Gene Circuits
Scientists engineered human pluripotent stem cells with synthetic gene circuits to control differentiation without human input.
Current methods to increase hPSC production rely on generating complicated culture conditions to mimic the cellular environment.2 Therefore, researchers are investigating alternative methods to reduce the level of human input needed to produce copious amounts of stem cells.
Peter Zandstra, a research scientist at the University of British Columbia, including first author Laura Prochazka, strategically designed a synthetic gene circuit to detect and control what differentiated state a cell is in.
This work was recently published in Molecular Systems Biology.
A synthetic gene circuit is an engineered gene network controlled through transcriptional or post-transcriptional regulations to coordinate a desired output.
In this study, the circuits were designed to detect a cell’s state (hPSC vs non-hPSC) or to modulate the expression of user-specified genes to control the differentiation state.
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