Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research

Research

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EuroStemCell, ESTools, EuroSyStem
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Stem Cell Potency

Group Leader: Austin Smith

The goal of our laboratory is to characterise the cellular and molecular mechanisms governing the formation, self-renewal and differentiation of pluripotent and tissue-restricted stem cells. Embryonic stem (ES) cells, which are derived directly from the pluripotential cells of the early mammalian embryo, can be propagated and manipulated in vitro whilst retaining the potential to generate every cell type of the organism. Neural stem (NS) cells can similarly be expanded in vitro but are restricted to generating cell types of the central nervous system. Our aim is to identify, characterise and understand the regulatory processes and machinery that govern self-renewal and lineage programming in these two stem cell types.

Austin Smith, PhD

Professor Austin Smith was captivated by pluripotency and stem cell self-renewal by undergraduate lectures from Professor Chris Graham in Oxford. He pursued this interest through PhD studies with Martin Hooper at the University of Edinburgh from 1982-86. Following postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford with John Heath, he returned to Edinburgh in 1990 as a Group Leader at the Centre for Genome Research. In 1996, he was appointed Director of the Centre, which under his leadership became the first Institute for Stem Cell Research in the United Kingdom.

Professor Smith was awarded an MRC Research Professorship in 2003. In 2006 he moved to the University of Cambridge where he is currently Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research. He coordinated the European Commission integrated project EuroStemCell (2004-2008) and currently coordinates the EuroSyStem project (2008-2012). Professor Smith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an elected member of EMBO, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Lab Members

Post-doctoral fellows: Steven Pollard, Jitsutaro Kawaguchi, Jose Silva, Ge Guo, Jian Yang, Joerg Betschinger, Anna Falk, Gillian Morrison, Yasuhiro Takashima, Tuzer Kalkan, Davide Danovi, Jason Wray.

Lab manager: James Giddings

Research assistant: Masayo Fujiwara

PhD Students: Sandra Gomez Lopez, Ole Wiskow, Ornella Barrandon, Kathryn Blair.

Recent Publications

  • Kunath T, Saba-El-Leil MK, Almousailleakh M, Wray J, Meloche S, Smith A.G. (2007). FGF stimulation of the Erk1/2 signalling cascade triggers transition of pluripotent embryonic stem cells from self-renewal to lineage commitment. Development 134: 2895-2902
  • Chambers I, Silva J, Colby D, Nichols J, Robertson M, Nijmeijer B, Vrana J, Grotewold L, Smith A.G. (2007) Nanog safeguards pluripotency and mediates germline development. Nature 450: 1230-1234
  • Silva J, Smith A (2008) Capturing Pluripotency. Cell 132:532-536
  • Ying QL, Wray J, Nichols J, Batlle-Morera L, Doble B, Woodgett J, Cohen P. and Smith A (2008) The ground state of embryonic stem cell self-renewal Nature 453: 519-523
  • Silva J, Barrandon O, Nichols J, Kawaguchi J, Theunissen T and Smith A. (2008) Promotion of reprogramming to ground state pluripotency by chemical inhibition PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 10, e275 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060275

From July 2008 the Smith laboratory does not submit research findings to, or referee for, NATURE magazine.