The current perspectives of dromedary camel stem cells research

Saadeldin, Islam M.; Abdel-Aziz Swelum, Ayman; Alzahrani, Faisal A.; Alowaimer, Abdullah N.

There are very few studies covered the camel stem cells and this field still in its early infancy. Recently, for the first time, we have isolated ESCs and trophectoderm stem cells from camel embryos on feeder-free conditions and showed the expression of all pluripotency genes (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and Myc) in the established cell lines through the conventional and real-time relative quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR and RQ-PCR) [42] . The isolated ESCs were successfully differentiated into neuron-like cells. Moreover, we found a differential expression of certain genes such as Klf4, which showed significant increase in trophoblasts when compared with the ESCs which raises the question as to whether Klf4 or other transcripts are essential for pluripotency in camels. These results motivated our team to sequence and identify the whole genes' sequences responsible for the pluripotency in camels and clone these genes to be easily used for transforming the differentiated somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells following the transfection of the cells with pluripotency transcription factors. Interestingly, BLAST analysis (The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool; https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi) for the predicted camel genes showed ∼90% matching with those known in humans (Table 1) .