Enough is enough: Stem cell factor Nanog knows when to slow down
Every stem cell researcher knows the protein Nanog because it ensures that these all-rounders continue to renew. A controversial debate revolved around how the quantity of Nanog protein in the cell is regulated. "So far it was often assumed that Nanog activates itself in order to preserve the pluripotency in embryonic stem cells," explains Dr. Carsten Marr. He heads the Quantitative Single Cell Dynamics research group at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) of the Helmholtz Zentrum München. Together with colleagues from ETH Zürich, he and his team have developed an algorithm called STILT (Stochastic Inference on Lineage Trees) that now rebuts this assumption. Using STILT, the scientists evaluated time -resolved protein expression data (already collected in 2015) from individual cells in which Nanog could be detected through fusion with a fluorescence protein. "We compared the Nanog dynamics that were measured in this way with three different models. One of t...