Isolamento, caracterização e diferenciação de células-tronco do tecido adiposo de glândula mamária bovina

Abstract

Animal cloning represents a major technological breakthrough, but.it is still an experimental technique and needs some improvement so it can truly be diffused in the agricultural and social environment. Among these techniques, one that has been highlighted is Cloning by nuclear transfer (NT) because of its use in transgenesis techniques, among others, becoming one viable alternative compared to the conventional methods such as pro-nuclear microinjection. However, the low efficiency of the process is a common problem associated with NT, being small the proportion of viable embryos that are reconstructed using somatic cells as nuclear donors. There are many factors playing roles on this low success rate, one of them being the incomplete reprogramming of donor’s somatic cell nucleus, leading to an abnormal expression of important genes related to embryo development. So, for the cloning to work properly, the donor cell nucleus must be completely reprogrammed after its transfer, ceasing its own gene expression programme. The actual stage of cell differentiation and epigenetic commitment of the donor cell may compromise the process, leading to think of using less committed cells in order to obtain a higher efficiency, such as adult stem cells. In the present work we isolate, characterize and test the differentiation potential of stem cells isolated from the adipose tissue of bovine mammary gland (CTGMB), and their characterization as similar to mesenchymal stem cells make interesting their potential use on cattle cell therapy, or even nuclear transfer cloning, once their application in such technique could help increasing its efficiency because CTGMB are more progenitor cells. Furthermore, since they are not committed to a specific cell type, they may be able to bypass epigenetic issues. The know-how and data presented here are novel and innovative, since in literature there is no record of any research group that has come to reach such a detailed characterization in bovine cells, and such protocols for obtaining CTGMB are patentable.