Stem Cell Engineering Group
Team leader: Frank Edenhofer
Cellular reprogramming and artificial derivation of somatic stem cells
Stem cells differ from somatic cells by their unique capacity to renew themselves and to give rise to differentiated cells. Forced expression of lineage-specific factors has been shown to reprogram the developmental plasticity of various somatic cell types. Our aim is to induce pluripotency and multipotency in somatic cell types and to understand the molecular mechanism underlying cellular reprogramming.
Engineering Cell-permeable Protein
One key technique established in our laboratory is protein transduction, i.e. the direct delivery of biologically active proteins into cells, which allows non-invasive manipulation of cellular properties. Within this video protocol published recently in the Journal of Visualized Experiments we demonstrate how to express and purify recombinant cell-permeant proteins, in this case the site-specific recombinase Cre, in and from E. coli.
To see this movie in high resolution click here
Targeted Differentiation for Neural Repair
In a second set of studies we analyze mechanisms of targeted differentiation of embryonic stem cells into neural lineages. To this aim we perform conditional mutagenesis of key genes that are involved in neural development in vitro. Our goal is to obtain highly purified ES cell-derived precursors for cell replacement strategies.
Funding
