School of Science Division of Life Science 35 Genetic Studies on Stem Cell Regulation Supervisor: XIE Ting / LIFS Student: CHEUNG Lok Yi / BIBU Course: UROP 1100, Fall Stem cells are undifferentiated or partly differentiated cells. They can carry out unlimited mitotic cell division to form new cells, and can differentiate into various types of specialised cells, ranging from muscle cells to brain or blood cells. Therefore, there are an array of potential applications of stem cells, especially in medicine, for instance cell research, drug toxicity tests and the treatment of diseases, to name but a few. Yet, the genes that are required in the niche and intrinsically for controlling stem cell self-renewal, differentiation and ageing still remain unclear. In this study, 30 lines of Drosophila RNAi lines, which against transmembrane proteins, were used for genetic screening so as to identify the genes that are involved in germline stem cells (GSC) regulation. Genetic Studies on Stem Cell Regulation Supervisor: XIE Ting / LIFS Student: GANGULY Noyonika Rajeev / BCB-IRE Course: UROP 1100, Fall Stem cell study is the foundation of stem cell therapy, a promising field of medical research. Stem cells have the advantage of undergoing self-renewal and differentiating into multiple cell types. However, certain factors pose challenges for using stem cells to treat diseases. For example, they have properties of tumorigenicity, immunogenicity, and heterogeneity which need to be addressed. Drosophila ovary is a commonly used model for studying the development of stem cells in vivo. Multiple pathways function together to control the self-renewal and differentiation of GSCs (germline stem cells) and SSCs (somatic stem cells). (Kirilly & Xie, 2007). This study screened genes which could be potential regulators in these pathways, and can therefore be used to provide insight into how the development of these stem cells is controlled. 15 RNAi lines were screened by observing the presence of abnormal phenotypes in the Drosophila germarium. These phenotypes include loss or reduction of GSCs due to a self-renewal defect, and accumulation of CBs (cystoblasts) due to a differentiation defect. In order to be able to observe these phenotypes using confocal imaging, the ovaries were immunostained. Abnormal phenotypes were observed in six lines of Nos-gal4 flies. Genetic Studies on Stem Cell Regulation Supervisor: XIE Ting / LIFS Student: KIM Hyejun / BIOT Course: UROP 3100, Fall UROP 4100, Spring Germline stem cells are regulated by responding to external and internal signals inside their microenvironment called stem cell niche. Revealing the specific molecular mechanisms that control this environment, which is not fully understood yet, is crucial to fully understanding how they work. The first step to understand the mechanism is identify genes involved in these processes. In this semester, the main objective was to observe phenotypic changes in GSC and CB in the absence of genes involved in different biological processes using Drosophila as model organism. After observing germarium of Drosophila ovaries, the result identified Spg7, Rel, Msh6, and PNKP as candidate genes that play important roles in GSC regulation.
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