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A team from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) has shown that the activity of the Polycomb protein is essential for proper differentiation of self and neural stem cells. According to managers of work, researchers at the CSIC and Carlos Miguel Vidal Vicario, control of these processes is "important" for the use of stem cells and differentiated cells in cell therapy protocols and regenerative medicine.

At work, he has published in its July issue the journal Stem Cells, have been used genetically modified mice to investigate the activity of Polycomb group genes, one of the epigenetic regulation modules (the mechanisms of genetic regulation that do not involve changes in DNA sequences), the self of the neural stem cells. Specifically, researchers conducted conditional inactivation of the protein RING1B.

Vicar says: "The analysis has been to study the behavior of neural stem cells in the olfactory bulb of mouse embryos in which, both in vitro and in vivo, were induced inactivation of RING1B to compare their effects with a control model that contained the protein itself. "Thus, investigators have verified that the capacity for proliferation and self-potential of neural stem cells depends on having appropriate levels of RING1B.

An attribute is characteristic of stem cell proliferation to combine their property (ie, the generation of daughter cells) and maintain the potential differential, ie the ability to give rise to other cell types. These properties are known as self-and multi / multipotencialidad and is essential for cell regeneration, stimulated by individual cells or transplanted cells in cell therapy protocols. "The identities of individual stem cells are defined by sets of proteins capable of binding to DNA, transcription factors, whose activity depends on the environment designed by the machinery of epigenetic regulation. In this context, maintains RING1B suppressed neuronal differentiation program stem cells, ie in the absence of RING1B most neurons are generated, detailing Vidal.

Researchers working in two centers of the CSIC: Cajal Institute and the Center for Biological Research, both in Madrid. At work has, in addition, the Center for Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases Network in Madrid, which also owns the Team Vicar.