Tuesday 30 July 2013

Generation of tooth-like structures from integration-free human urine induced pluripotent stem cells

Cell Regeneration 2013, 2:6
Published: 30 July 2013
doi:10.1186/2045-9769-2-6

Jinglei Cai [1], Yanmei Zhang [1], Pengfei Liu [1,2], Shubin Chen [1], Xuan Wu [1,2], Yuhua Sun [3], Ang Li [4], Ke Huang [1], Rongping Luo [1], Lihui Wang [1], Ying Liu [1,5], Ting Zhou [1], Shicheng Wei [3,6], Guangjin Pan [1] and Duanqing Pei [1]

1 CAS Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, South China Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 190 Kai Yuan Avenue, Science Park, Guangzhou 510530, P.R.China

2 Department of Regeneration Medicine, School of Pharmaceutical, Jilin University, Changchun, P.R. China

3 Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Studies, School and Hospital of Stomatology, Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China

4 Biodynamic Optical Imaging Center (BIOPIC), Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China

5 The Shenzhen Key Lab of Gene and Antibody Therapy, Center for Biotech & Biomedicine and Division of Life Sciences, Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, P.R. China

6 Center for Biomedical Materials and Tissue Engineering, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China

Background

Tooth is vital not only for a good smile, but also good health. Yet, we lose tooth regularly due to accidents or diseases. An ideal solution to this problem is to regenerate tooth with patients’ own cells. Here we describe the generation of tooth-like structures from integration-free human urine induced pluripotent stem cells (ifhU-iPSCs).

Results

We first differentiated ifhU-iPSCs to epithelial sheets, which were then recombined with E14.5 mouse dental mesenchymes. Tooth-like structures were recovered from these recombinants in 3 weeks with success rate up to 30% for 8 different iPSC lines, comparable to H1 hESC. We further detected that ifhU-iPSC derived epithelial sheets differentiated into enamel-secreting ameloblasts in the tooth-like structures, possessing physical properties such as elastic modulus and hardness found in the regular human tooth.

Conclusion

Our results demonstrate that ifhU-iPSCs can be used to regenerate patient specific dental tissues or even tooth for further drug screening or regenerative therapies.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

http://www.cellregenerationjournal.com/content/2/1/6

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F2045-9769-2-6

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Monday 15 July 2013

Unusual but sound minds: Mental health indicators in spiritual individuals

British Journal of Psychology
Volume 104, Issue 3, pages 364–381, August 2013
Issue published online: 15 JUL 2013

Miguel Farias, Raphael Underwood and Gordon Claridge

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, England

Previous research has linked certain types of modern spirituality, including New Age and Pagan, with either benign schizotypy or insecure attachment. While the first view emphasizes a positive aspect of spiritual believers’ mental health (benign schizotypy), the second view emphasizes a negative aspect, namely the unhealthy emotional compensation associated with an insecure attachment style. This study addresses these two conflicting views by comparing a sample of modern spiritual individuals (N = 114) with a contrast group of traditional religious believers (N = 86). Measures of schizotypy and attachment style were combined with mental health scales of anxiety and depression. We further assessed death anxiety to determine whether modern spiritual beliefs fulfilled a similar function as traditional religious beliefs in the reduction of existential threat. Our results support a psychological contiguity between traditional and modern spiritual believers and reinforce the need to de-stigmatize spiritual ideas and experiences. Using hierarchical regression, we showed that unusual experiences and ideas are the major predictor of engagement in modern spiritual practices. Anxiety, depression variables, and insecure attachment were not significant predictors of spirituality or correlated with them; on the other hand, the results show that spiritual believers report high social support satisfaction and this variable predicts involvement in modern spirituality. Further, spiritual practices were negatively correlated with and negatively predicted by death anxiety scores. Overall, the results strengthen the association between modern spirituality, good mental health, and general well-being.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02128.x/abstract

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