(13)
Totipotent cells, which are found in fertilized human
Pluripotent cells are different from
totipotent cells in that pluripotent cells can develop into nearly every kind of cell that makes up a human being, but cannot form a placenta, and cannot survive alone in a womb.
This dimension of personhood also points to the importance of seeing the individual as an integrated whole, a quality that
totipotent cells, on their way to becoming human individuals, do not yet possess completely since they could possibly form identical twins and chimeras.
The research demonstrated that for reasons yet unknown, chimeric animals can only develop from
totipotent cells (cells from the early embryo that have the ability to divide and produce all of the differentiated cells in the placenta and the body of organism) in a higher animal model: the rhesus macaque.
Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, went so far as to say that the embryo is just "
totipotent cells" until it is implanted and attains adulthood!
(44.) In other words there is still some "totipotentiality" although such
totipotent cells have not been found or purified at this stage of embryonic development.
Lemaux, 1997, personal communication) have been used recently as
totipotent cells for oat transformation.
In this process, which has been available to animal breeders for decades, scientists take a young embryo, still composed of
totipotent cells, and divide it in half or thirds or quarters.
Morphogenetic responses of cultured
totipotent cells of carrot (Daucus carota var.
Competing cell lineages in chimeric entities should gain a disproportionate share of gametic output by, for example, restricting the differentiation of the
totipotent cells to gametic descendants, while using the somatic constituents of the other partner for maintenance and space provisions for gametes (Buss, 1982, 1983; Buss and Green, 1985; Grosberg, 1988; Sabbadin and Astorri, 1988).
However, adult stem cells have limitations regarding their potency; unlike ESCs, they are not able to differentiate into cells from all three germ layers and are thereby deemed multipotent versus
totipotent cells. However, reprogramming allows for the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from adult cells.
Specifically, they have the characteristics of
totipotent cells; a primitive state never before obtained in a laboratory.