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| ICOB research team discovers that formation of ovarian germline stem cell niches is controlled by cell-cell adhesion |
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 The research group of Dr. Hwei-Jan Hsu, an assistant research fellow in the Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, has uncovered that Hedgehog signaling controls formation of ovarian germline stem cell niches by regulating cell-cell adhesion. The physical segregation of cells into different lineage groups may be a common strategy for selecting cells to occupy stem cell niches in different organs. The research was published in The Journal of Cell Biology on May 1st, 2017.
Stem cells reside in a specialized microenvironment called the niche, which supplies both physical contact and diffused factors that are necessary to recruit and maintain stem cells. However, it is currently unclear how stem cell niches are initially established. Dr. Hsu’s research team provided genetic, molecular and cytological evidence to show that during development of the Drosophila melanogaster ovary, a concentration gradient for Hedgehog protein creates differential cell affinities in somatic gonadal precursor cells that is critical to specify these cells into stromal intermingled cells. These intermingled cells express low levels of E-cadherin that intermingle with germline stem cells and then populate both the germline stem cell maintenance niche and the differentiation niche in adult tissue. The authors further discovered that the gene for Traffic Jam (an orthologue of a large Maf transcription factor in mammals) is a novel transcriptional target of Hedgehog signaling, and Traffic Jam upregulation mediates the effects on cell–cell adhesion by negatively regulating E-cadherin expression. Overall, the study provides a thorough description of the process through which Hedgehog signaling establishes stem cell niches by affecting adhesion in precursor cells to segregate somatic cell lineages for differentiation.
The research was carried out by the team of Dr. Hsu, in collaboration with Dr. Fu Huang from the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica. The first author, Chun-Ming Lai, is a PhD candidate in the Taiwan International Graduate Program-Molecular & Biological Agricultural Science Program. Mr. Lai performed the majority of experiments.
The research project was funded by grants from Academia Sinica and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan. The full research article can be found at http://jcb.rupress.org/content/216/5/1439
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