Direct Reprogramming

[deleted-331201]

Hi!
I have a question on the project: "Taking Short Cuts: How Direct Reprogramming Can Transform One Type of Cell Straight into Another." I have done all the research for the transcription factors, but how do I know which transcription factors to choose?
Are those that are highly expressed the best for reprogramming experiments? I am just unsure as how to know which are the best factors. I tried google but none of it is helping. Thank you

[SciB]

Hi,

This project involves some pretty advanced science so I'm not surprised that you have questions. Let's see what the instructions say about choosing the transcription factors:

"How do scientists pick which transcription factors to use? The scientists select a target cell type - the type of cell that they want to create. They then look at what transcription factors these cells normally make. At the same time, they select a cell type that they can start out with, a tissue that a person can easily donate, such as blood. Once they have done this research, they can take the starting cell type and force it to make the transcription factors that their target cell type normally makes. Ideally, these transcription factors will transform the cell type into their target cell type. Of course, this is a simplification of the process. In practice, many complications can make it difficult to directly reprogram cells successfully." (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... background)

OK, now go to the Procedure section, https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... #procedure
Here it gives you in Table 1 a list of many different kinds of tissue--kidney, liver, brain, heart, etc. These are the targets that you are trying to create--not ALL of them--you just pick one! Say you want to reprogram some adult cells into brain cells--new neurons to replace some dead ones. Look at Table 1 under 'Brain' and you will see a list of associated transcription factors (TFs). These TFs are the proteins that you want to become active in the cells.

Now you have a lot of work to do. You have to Google search each of the TFs, read about them and pick out the information about which types of cells express them and to what degree. The Wikipedia entries for these TFs have good descriptions so just do a Google search by typing the name of the TF followed by 'wiki'.

What a scientist tries to do in reprogramming is choose those TFs that are specific to the target tissue. All TFs are expressed by several different types of cell, but some are more important in a certain kind of cell. This is the information that you have to dig out. It's not easy because the scientific terminology may be unfamiliar to you.

To check your choices you could try searching for 'transcription factors neurons' and see if the TFs you picked to make a brain are the ones that other scientists have identified as important markers for neurons. The best place to do this either Google Scholar or PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). You will retrieve published papers from the scientific literature. Read the title first and if it sounds like it might be useful read the abstract. If it is too complicated, try another paper. Try to find a review as those papers have a lot of information.

I'm sure you will have more questions, so just repost and we will try to make things clear for you. The ideas are fairly simple--it's the details and scientific jargon that make it hard to understand.

Good luck!

Sybee