Scientists have just turned giant panda skin cells into stem cells

With roughly 2,000 giant pandas remaining within the wild, scientists have spent the last a few decades searching out new how it truly is easy to lend a hand the iconic black-and-white bears stave off extinction. And now, it seems there may perhaps also be more hope than ever ahead of.

For the primary time, scientists have taken ordinary skin cells from the animal and transformed them into stem cells, the team reports September 20 in Science Advances. Having such a stem cell, perchance also be nudged into becoming any kind of cell within the body, may per chance lend a hand researchers breed more giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) and develop treatments for their diseases.

This result “is in point of fact a wonderful breakthrough within the sphere of big panda conservation,” says Thomas Hildebrandt, a veterinarian who makes a speciality of wildlife reproduction at the Free University of Berlin and turned into not affiliated with the research. It “opens up an entire new avenue [to rescue] this magnificent species and icon of conservation,” and can suggest strategies for generating stem cells for other vulnerable and endangered species.

Researchers have already turned both mice and human skin cells, often called fibroblasts, into stem cells, in particular pluripotent stem cells (SN: 12/24/14). These stem cells “have unlimited proliferation potential and would per chance form any kind of cell, tissue or organ within the body under certain conditions,” says Liu Jing, a stem cell researcher at Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The catch with creating them is that the strategy should be tailored to each new species.

To reprogram pandas’ fibroblasts into pluripotent stem cells, the team first put some genes known to reprogram adult cells into the skin cells along with small RNA molecules known to augment the transition to stem cells. The researchers also needed to perceive the express proteins and growth factors that would per chance lend a hand turn the panda skin cells to stem cells, besides as ones that would per chance keep them within the pluripotent state.

Having pluripotent cells no doubt on demand may per chance allow scientists to create giant panda primordial germ cells, precursors to sperm and egg cells, a feat that’s been done in mice  and northern white rhinos (SN: 10/17/sixteen).

Obtaining these panda sex cells has been hard since the vast majority of the living panda population continues to be under strict protections that forbid typical egg extraction techniques, such as giving pandas medicine to make extra eggs in a cycle or retrieving eggs from ovaries. There are also too few pandas remaining to reliably source eggs from recently deceased animals.

If scientists may per chance generate sperm and egg cells from pandas in a noninvasive manner, such as turning these skin cells into stem cells and then germ cells, and use those to make new pandas, the team may perhaps also be capable of feature genetic diversity to the animals that remain. Currently, there are 33 isolated populations, 15 of which are very with regards to extinction.

Creating primordial germ cells from the stem cells is the team’s next step. But assisting the pandas’ reproduction with technology just won't be the handiest goal. There’s use for pluripotent stem cells in disease diagnosis and treatment. Indirectly, Jing says, the hope is to both amplify the big panda population and make it more fit.

The team’s findings may perhaps also hold great potential for achieving the stem cell transformation in other endangered species. “It’s like a library you utilize,” says Hildebrandt, who has been instrumental in similar efforts to prevent northern white rhinos from going extinct (SN: 7/four/18). “You recognize, there are a lot of books which describe the same thing but describe it from a different angle.”

Scientists have also created pluripotent stem cells for drills, Tasmanian devils, Grevy’s zebras and Sumatran rhinos. With yet another book added to the library, who knows which species scientists should be capable of apply the stem cell technology to next?