Antonello Zeus A, Reiff Tobias, Dominguez Maria
a Instituto de Neurociencias; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC); and Universidad Miguel Hernández (UMH) ; Campus de Sant Joan, Apartado 18, 03550 Sant Joan, Alicante , Spain.
Fly (Austin). 2015;9(3):132-7. doi: 10.1080/19336934.2016.1140709.
Stem cells are responsible for preserving morphology and function of adult tissues. Stem cells divide to self-renew and to generate progenitor cells to sustain cell demand from the tissue throughout the organism's life. Unlike stem cells, the progenitor cells have limited proliferation potential but have the capacity to terminally differentiate and thereby to substitute older or damaged mature cells. Recent findings indicate that adult stem cells can adapt their division kinetics dynamically to match changes in tissue demand during homeostasis and regeneration. However, cell turnover not only requires stem cell division but also needs timed differentiation of the progenitor cells, which has been much less explored. In this Extra View article, we discuss the ability of progenitor cells to actively postpone terminal differentiation in the absence of a local demand and how tissue demand activates terminal differentiation via a conserved mesenchymal-epithelial transition program revealed in our recent EMBO J paper and other published and unpublished data. The extent of the significance of these results is discussed for models of tissue dynamics during both homeostasis and regeneration.
干细胞负责维持成体组织的形态和功能。干细胞通过分裂实现自我更新，并产生祖细胞，以在生物体的整个生命过程中满足组织对细胞的需求。与干细胞不同，祖细胞的增殖潜力有限，但具有终末分化的能力，从而能够替代衰老或受损的成熟细胞。最近的研究结果表明，成体干细胞能够动态调整其分裂动力学，以适应稳态和再生过程中组织需求的变化。然而，细胞更新不仅需要干细胞分裂，还需要祖细胞的定时分化，而这方面的研究要少得多。在这篇“额外观点”文章中，我们讨论了祖细胞在缺乏局部需求时主动推迟终末分化的能力，以及组织需求如何通过我们最近发表在《EMBO杂志》上的论文以及其他已发表和未发表的数据中揭示的保守的间充质-上皮转化程序激活终末分化。我们还讨论了这些结果对于稳态和再生过程中组织动力学模型的重要意义。
