Current Stem Cell Research & Therapy - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018

Background: Tooth loss occurs with age and significantly impacts the quality of elderly's life both physically and psychologically. It has been well known that odontogenesis is a complicated process with sequential and reciprocal interactions between epithelial and mesenchymal tissues and different types of dental tissue-derived stem cells involve in it. However, only a small portion of the intricate mechanisms has been defin Read More

Background: The Hippo signaling pathway serves as a main regulator of tissue growth and organ size through the moderation of cell cycle dynamics across many different species. In mammals, the two downstream transcriptional regulators of this pathway are Yes-associated protein (YAP) and transcriptional co-activator with PDZ binding motif (TAZ). Recent studies found in addition to the core Hippo signaling pathway Read More

Background: Bone mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) are multipotent stromal cells providing a useful cell source for treating bone diseases and metabolic disorders. BMSCs fate determination and lineage progression are controlled by multiple cytokines, transcriptional factors, signaling pathways, and microRNAs (miRNAs). MiRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that inhibit the posttranscriptional gene expression or degrade Read More

Background: Epigenetic modifications have been evidenced to participate in eukaryotic stem cell fate decision. Among the most studied, 5-methylcytosine (m5C) and its derivatives are wellestablished epigenetic codes that play important roles in stem cell pluripotency and differentiation. Based on improved detection techniques, recent studies have succeeded in defining N6-adenine methylation (m6A) in eukaryotic DNA a Read More

Background: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in teeth have been exploited as vital seed cells for stem cell-based dental medicine. To date, several mesenchymal stem cell populations originated from odontogenic tissue have been isolated and characterized by their expression of MSC surface markers and capacity of multi-lineage differentiation, including dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs), stem cells from human exfoliated decidu Read More

Background: Epithelial tissues have the ability to self-renew throughout animal's life due to the presence of the epithelial stem cells. Except for complicated genes regulation, the fate of epithelial stem cells is also regulated by the epigenetics, including DNA methylation, histone modification and microRNAs, which are emerging as vital elements of epigenetic regulation for epithelial stem cells self-renewal and differentiation. Read More

Background: Long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) are non-protein coding transcripts longer than 200 nucleotides in length. Instead of being “transcriptional noise”, lncRNAs are emerging as a key modulator in various biological processes and disease development. Mesenchymal stem cells can be isolated from various adult tissues, such as bone marrow and dental tissues. The differentiation processes into multiple linea Read More

Background: Some research studies provided evidence for the differentiation capacity of adult stem cells (ASCs) into germ cells (GCs). Since the generation of GCs from stem cells (SCs) has been proposed as a potential way for treatment of infertility, many research groups have begun their creative studies on generation of new GCs both in vitro and in vivo, and utilized different ASC types such as bone marrow mesenchymal Read More