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POPSHow Stem Cells Decide What They'll Become They began by examining populations of seemingly identical blood stem cells, and found that a cell marker of "stemness," a protein called Sca-1, was actually present in highly variable amounts from cell to cell -- in fact, they found a 1,000-fold range. One might think that low Sca-1 cells are simply those cells that have spontaneously differentiated. However, when Huang and Chang divided the cells expressing low, medium and high levels of Sca-1 and cultured them, each descendent cell population recapitulated the same broad range of Sca-1 levels over nine days or more, regardless of what levels they started with. Blood stem cells with low levels of Sca-1 differentiated into red blood cell progenitors seven times more often than cells high in Sca-1 when exposed to erythropoietin, a growth factor that promotes red blood cell production.
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