Researchers headed by a team at the University of Illinois (U of I) Urbana-Champaign now report on the discovery of a protein that plays a key role in prompting stem cells in the body to switch off their pluripotency and adopt a final functional state. Their studies indicated that the molecule, known as BEND3, acts to shut down the expression of hundreds of genes associated with differentiation, so maintaining the cell’s stem cell-like status. Their findings indicated that only when BEND3 is downregulated can cells differentiate into their designated form and function. And once cells differentiate, they usually stop actively proliferating.
