Totipotent: can mature into any type of body cell in an organism, including the cells that make up the
placenta
Pluripotent: can mature into any cell in the body, but not the placenta
Multipotent: can mature into a few different types of cell
Unipotent: only can mature into one type of cell
Mitotic division of the zygote forms a ball of cells called the blastocyst In very early embryo (morula stage) stem cells are totipotent., from the inner mass of a blastocyst they are pluripotent.
USES OF STEM CELLS
• Cancer and disease research
• Therapeutic cloning
• Conservation of rare species
• Drug testing
FUTURE APPLICATION
• Repair heart muscle after a heart attack
• Pancreas cells lost in diabetes
• Neurons lost in Alzheimer’s
• Retinal cells causing blindness
• Help organ transplantation
• Understand the cell growths in cancer
HOW TO GET PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
• Spare embryos from fertility treatment
• Grow to form blastocyst
• Stem cells isolated and cultured and kept, but the embryo legally has to be killed after 14 days
SCNT- SOMATIC CELL NUCLEAR TRANSFER
• Used for reproductive cloning such as cloning an embryo
• Used for regenerative cloning to produce ‘customized’ stem cells and overcome immune
rejection i.e. therapeutic cloning
THERAPEUTIC CLONING
• A solution would be to grow the patients a new organ from their own stem cells
• Remove a diploid cell from the patient. Take out the nucleus from an ovum. Add the empty egg and the diploid nucleus together.
• Result is similar to a zygote