ABSTRACT
The stem cell biology plays an important role in the application and research of the clinical medicine and biology. The breakthrough of the therapies for a variety of human diseases depends on the rapid growth of stem cell biology. It is of great significance to set up graduate curriculum of stem cell biology in the medical college. This article elaborates the design and implementation of the course of Stem Cell Biology including the selection of the teaching materials, design of course outline, teaching content, evaluation methods, teaching introspection and other aspects, thus providing references and communications in this field.
ABSTRACT
Tendon is a dense connective tissue that connects muscle to bone. Tendon can adapt to mechanical forces passing across it, through a reciprocal relationship between its cellular components (tenocytes and tenoblasts) and the extracellular matrix (ECM). In early development, the formation of scleraxis-expressing tendon progenitor population in the sclerotome is induced by a fibroblast growth factor signal secreted by the myotome. Tendon injury has been defined as a loss of cells or ECM caused by trauma. It represents a failure of cells and matrix adaptation to mechanical loading. Injury initiates attempts of tendon to repair itself, which has been defined as replacement of damaged or lost cells and ECM by new cells or new matrices. Tendon healing generally consists of four different phases: the inflammatory, proliferation, differentiation and remodelling phases. Clinically, tendons are repaired with a variety of surgical techniques, which show various degrees of success. In order to improve the conventional tendon repair methods, current tendon tissue engineering aims to investigate a repair method which can restore tissue defects with living cells, or cell based therapy. Advances in tissue engineering techniques would potentially yield to a cell-based product that could regenerate functional tendon tissue.
Subject(s)
Tissue EngineeringABSTRACT
During the recent 5 years,an upsurge of stem cell biology research has appeared around the world with a huge number of papers published.A part of them,however,concluded with a hypothesis of so called "transdifferentiation" or "stem cell plasticity" that stem cells could transform into any other tissues such as fats becoming liver or muscle changing into nervous cells and so on,that all lacks of strong evidence.The discovery of adult stem cells(ASC) in the adult tissues was actually a great scientific epoch-making towards the end of 1999 though the authors made a wrong conclusion of transdifferentiation at that time.More and more evidences showed that the ASC in the adult tissue are the remnants of stem cells from every stage of embryonic development.The tissue specific stem cells harbored in the adult tissues can only be induced to differentiate in the progeny cells of its own committed origin.ASC includes hematopoietic and non-hematopoietic stem cells and there are lots of stem cells in the latter,like nervous stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells(MSC).The progenies of MSC are the connective tissues,such as osteoblasts,chodroblasts,myocytes,angio-endothelio cells,etc,which are most important during the recovery and reconstitution of tissue injury,ischemic necrosis and hematopoietic damage.