Abstract
The promise of nuclear transfer (NT) in producing patient-specific embryonic stem cells for regenerative medicine holds great interest for the treatment of human diseases, whether as tools for "disease in a dish" discoveries or as replacement cells in patient therapies. With the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, current debates flourish over whether human NT is necessary, given the limitations of burdensome technical, ethical, and legal issues. Non-human primates (NHP) are superior models for understanding the stepwise events of successful primate NT and could provide easier extrapolations to events in humans than rodent cloning model. Early challenges to producing cloned NHP blastocysts using traditional NT technologies successful in rodent and cows were overcome by modifications to enucleation, artificial activation, and embryo culture in monkeys. Regardless, adoption of these technical advances in human NT has yet to produce stable human pluripotent embryonic stem cells, and recent reports suggest that human meiotic spindle removal as the first step in the cloning process remains detrimental to producing viable human ESC lines. This chapter provides a review on challenges in nuclear transfer in primates - non-human and human alike.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Principles of Cloning |
Subtitle of host publication | Second Edition |
Publisher | Elsevier Inc. |
Pages | 299-310 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780123865410 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2013 Oct |
Keywords
- Centriole
- Centrosomes
- Eg5
- HSET
- Microtubules
- Molecular motors
- Nuclear transfer
- NuMA
- Primate cloning
- Regenerative medicine
- Somatic cell nuclear transfer
- Spindle enucleation
- Stem cell