Culture of embryoid bodies

Abstract

Regenerative medicine offers a novel therapeutic approach to a wide variety of human diseases. It is based on stem cells and their capability to self-renew indefinitely and to differentiate into several tissue-specific cell types. In the past, embryonic stem (ES) cells were shown to maintain their proliferative and undifferentiated state in vitro using special cell culture conditions. ES cells are fully pluripotent and can be differentiated into all cell types of the three embryonic germ layers. ES cells are isolated from the inner cell mass (ICM) of the early mammalian blastocyst-stage embryo (Fig. 1) and are purified using special cell-sorting facilities (Bradley et al. 1984). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.