Understanding the developmental program of human germ cells is important to reproductive health including fertility, sex determination and cancer. We have a long-term interest in understanding the genetic and molecular events of human germ cell development, especially the early events from hESCs to germ cells. Human ES cells provide us unprecedented opportunity to study these events because we can now differentiate hESCs to human germ cells in a tissue culture dish and analyze their developmental program.
Articles related to this topic:
Kee, K., et al., 2006. Bone morphogenetic proteins induce germ cell differentiation from human embryonic stem cells. Stem Cells Dev. 15, 831-7. Abstract »
Clark, A. T., et al., 2004. Spontaneous differentiation of germ cells from human embryonic stem cells in vitro. Hum Mol Genet. 13, 727-39. Abstract »