更多资讯

The interest in hepatocyte transplantation has been growing continuously in recent years and this treatment may represent an alternative clinical approach for patients with acute liver failure and liver-based metabolic disorders. This chapter presents an overview of liver cell t ...

Laser-scanning in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM) of the cornea is becoming an increasingly popular tool to examine the living human cornea with cellular-level detail in both healthy and pathologic states. Here, we describe the use of the IVCM technique to examine the processes of tissue hea ...

Collagen has excellent biocompatibility, is biodegradable, and possesses low immunogenicity. Therefore, this protein is a very suitable substrate for the formation of a corneal scaffold for therapeutic use. The highly hydrated nature of conventional collagen gels, however, res ...

The potential of cell therapy for the regeneration of diseased and damaged tissues is now widely �recognized. As a consequence there is a demand for the development of novel systems that can deliver cells to a particular location, maintaining viability, and then degrade at a predictable rate to r ...

The injured or otherwise damaged cornea is healed by limbal stem cells (LSC). If the limbus where LSC reside is also damaged or nonfunctional, the cornea cannot heal properly and this defect leads to impaired vision that can result in blindness. The only way to treat total LSC deficiency is by transplan ...

In delivering tissues to the body, both natural and synthetic materials have been used. Currently, a natural membrane, the human amniotic membrane (AM), is used to deliver limbal epithelial cells (LEC) to the cornea. AM presents inherent problems with structural variation and requires exte ...

Fibroin extracted from silkworm cocoon silk provides an intriguing and potentially important biomaterial for corneal reconstruction. In this chapter we outline our methods for producing a composite of two fibroin-based materials that support the cocultivation of human limbal e ...

Human recombinant collagen can be cross-linked with a variety of chemical cross-linking agents. Cross-linking methods can be tuned to confer collagen-based scaffolds with specific physical properties, improved antigenicity and thermal stability without impeding the abili ...

The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye and comprises three distinct cell layers. One of these cell layers is a self-renewing epithelium long believed to harbor a resident stem cell population. The location and characteristics of corneal epithelial stem cells have now been confirm ...

The transplantation of cultured limbal epithelial cells (LEC) has since its first application in 1997 emerged as a promising technique for treating limbal stem cell deficiency. The culture methods hitherto used vary with respect to preparation of the harvested tissue, choice of culture ...

The unambiguous identification of limbal epithelial stem cells is currently a major challenge in corneal stem cell biology. Specific molecular markers which characterize these cells are lacking. At present, the best strategy for identification of limbal epithelial stem cells is to i ...

The use of a specific antibody bound to magnetic beads to isolate subpopulations of cells is an efficient and simple technique that allows for the subsequent study of different cell populations. One important use of this isolation technique is the purification of stem cells from a mixed cell pop ...

Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) incorporation assays have long been used to detect DNA synthesis in vivo and in vitro. The key principle of this method is that BrdU incorporated as a thymidine analog into nuclear DNA represents a label that can be tracked using antibody probes. In this chapter, we descri ...

While convincing data clearly suggest the presence of stem cells in the basal limbal epithelium in vivo, testing the proliferation, self-renewal, and differentiation capacity of stem cells relies on the development of methodologies that allow for their isolation and extensive propa ...

Human corneal transplantation to date suffers from the shortage of good-quality donor tissue, and in some conditions, allografting is contraindicated. A range of artificial replacements to donor allograft corneas have been developed. These range from keratoprostheses (KPro) th ...

The cornea, the clear window at the front of the eye, transmits light to the retina to enable vision. The corneal surface is renewed by stem cells located at the peripheral limbal region. These cells can be destroyed by a number of factors, including chemical burns, infections, and autoimmune diseases, ...

The mammalian inner ear has very limited ability to regenerate lost sensory hair cells. This deficiency becomes apparent when hair cell loss leads to hearing loss as a result of either ototoxic insult or the aging process. Coincidently, with this inability to regenerate lost hair cells, the adult ...

To understand the mechanisms of development of the inner ear, it is important to know the lineal relationships among the different cell types and the migrational boundaries of individual clones within the inner ear. This chapter details the basic methods for performing lineage analysis of t ...

In situ hybridization is well suited to obtaining specific topological information on gene transcripts and thereby to relating such observations to a particular function. In spite of the technical and practical difficulties, the application of molecular biological techniques s ...

Natural RNA sensors of small molecules (a.k.a. riboswitches) regulate numerous metabolic genes. In bacteria, these RNA elements control transcription termination and translation initiation by changing the folding pathway of nascent RNA upon direct binding of a metabolite. To ide ...