A new discovery about how a stem cell respires could lead to a breakthrough in cancer treatment, UCLA researchers announced Tuesday.
“A lot of attention is being paid to the role of metabolism in pluripotent stem cells for making properly differentiated cell lineages for research and potential clinical uses,” researcher Dr. Michael Teitell of Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and professor at UCLA, said in a news release. "The initial question prompting our study was whether metabolism in pluripotent stem cells and cancer cells, which also rely heavily on glycolysis, were molecularly similar,” he said. “This question led us to study the details of energy-generation by mitochondria in pluripotent stem cells.”
Human pluripotent stem cells can develop into any cell type in the body. They rely on sugar fermentation process known as glycolysis to fuel them. But mature cells rely on mitochondria to convert sugar and oxygen into carbon dioxide and water, in an energy-producing process called oxidative phosphorylation, or respiration. But researchers didn't yet know how one process evolves into the other.
They assumed stem cell mitochondria could not respire, and that they gained the ability to respire when cells transformed from pluripotent stem cells into differentiated adult cells over time.
