Discovery of a new regulatory protein provides new tool for stem cell engineering
The findings were published online in Cell Reports on March 28. "This discovery provides a fine-tuning knob for the stem cell engineering toolkit," said Sheng Zhong, a bioengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the study's senior author. "A number of previously identified regulatory proteins can be considered as rough-tuning knobs that result in greater changes in cellular behavior. We need both tools to precisely set stem cells into the desired cellular state so that they can carry out the functions that we desire." The researchers discovered that the protein, called SMARCAD1, interacts with a specific type of histone modification, called histone citrullination (H3R26Cit), to prevent the spontaneous switch from the naïve to the primed pluripotent state. By suppressing SMARCAD1 from interacting with H3R26Cit, researchers were able to induce this switch. They also found that the stem cells with suppressed SMARCAD1 expres...