The paper, published in the March 14 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, presents elegant experiments that involve transplantation of bone marrow cells from a male donor mouse to a female recipient. The cells were engineered such that they became fluorescent if the insulin gene is switched on. Hussain and colleagues found male cells (marked by the presence of the Y chromosome) in the pancreas of recipient female mice. These cells were fluorescent – which means that they had developed into insulin-expressing cells--and looked and behaved like functional beta cells based on a variety of other assays. Some previous claims of pluripotent adult stem cells have been undermined by cell fusion events during which a transplanted bone marrow cell fuses with existing beta cells. Taking further advantage of the power to genetically engineer and mark cells in mice, the scientists designed a second experiment that allowed them to exclude that the fluorescent beta-like cells resulted from such events.
Markus Stoffel, a diabetes expert at Rockefeller University, New York City, who discusses the findings and their implications in an accompanying commentary, suggests that "the use of bone marrow as a source of pancreatic beta-cell precursors has the potential for ex vivo expansion, differentiation, and autologous transplantation".
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View the PDF of this article at: http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/111/6/843
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY:
Bone marrow: An extrapancreatic hideout for the elusive pancreatic stem cell?
CONTACT:
Markus Stoffel
Rockefeller University
Laboratory of Metabolic Diseases
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E-mail: stoffel@rockvax.rockefeller.edu
Journal of Clinical Investigation