Has there been any research on producing stem cells from specialized cells? Or is there something fundamentally impossible about this, akin to producing the original content given only a hash value?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16904174/
Even though nobody is quite sure how it works, it's possible to reverse the epigenetics of a cell back to its original differentiated state and even back to stem cell form not entirely unlike rolling back git commits.
Unsurprisingly, lots.
People have been researching this for a long time, with some famous success stories, eg.
The article kind of alludes poorly to this, but somatic cell nuclear transfer (developed by John Durdon) was a huge milestone in the field that eventually led to Yamanaka's discovery of the pluripotency factors, for which they both won the Nobel prize in 2012.
I recall when Dolly was in the news, but only understood the broad strokes of the process. I did scan through that page for 'stem', and found a reference to future research, and noted the replication from an 'adult cell' (which I'd assume analogous to differentiated cell).
I'd guess the transfer process is why she arrived with shorter telomeres at birth?
That's correct.
> I'd guess the transfer process is why she arrived with shorter telomeres at birth?
Also spot on. The donor somatic cell likely had shortened telomeres, resulting in shorter length in the embryo. It's kind of an interesting research question, because telomere length gets "restored" for germ cells (otherwise every time an organism produced sperm/eggs the telomeres would shorten), and these types of experiments demonstrate that there is a limit to that restorative process.