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. 2009 Nov 13;4(11):e7809. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007809

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Aranda et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.

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Genes implicated in pluripotency (Oct4, Sox2, Nanog) are transcriptionally active in ESC due to the lack of repressive marks as well as by their own potential to transactivate their own transcription favoring the greater differentiation potential of ESC. Differentiation genes, on the contrary are silenced on ESC due to several epigenetic mechanisms that include expression of miRNA, DNA promoter methylation and repressive histone marks that all together cooperate to induce down-regulation of differentiation genes. A decrease in the differentiation potential of ASC (MAPC, MSC and ADSC) is mediated by the silencing of pluripotency genes downregulated through the expression of certain miRNA. The presence of PcG proteins (particularly SUZ12) on the promoters of differentiation genes but the lack of methylation on MAPC could explain their reduced expression. Finally, the lack of PcG marks along with the increase in open chromatin marks in the promoters of differentiation genes would explain the greater expression of these genes as well as the more restricted differentiation potential of ASC (MSC and ADSC).