Breaking the link between morphology and potency for mESCs.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In stem cell biology, a long-held structure-function relationship is the domed colony morphology and naïve pluripotency for mouse or human pluripotent stem cells. This link has provided a convenient way to recognize bona fide naïve pluripotent cells during derivation, passaging and characterization. However, the molecular basis of this link remains poorly understood.

Results

We show that a loss of domed morphology may not impact the overall genetic architecture of naïve pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). We first generated stable mESC lines by knocking out Myh9 that encodes non-muscle myosin heavy chain IIA, resulting in colonies deprived of the typical domed morphology, but competent to differentiate into the three germ layers and chimeric mice.

SUBMITTER: Fan Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12551208 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature