Differentiation plasticity of hematopoietic cells

Hematopoiesis has been for many years seen as a straightforward process based on sequential restriction of cell fate potential leading to production of mature blood cells. In the last decade, however, several works documented an unexpected plasticity of hematopoietic cells with expanded potential of myeloid development from lymphoid progenitors and vice versa. Under physiologic conditions hematopoiesis is tightly controlled and the definite cell fate is denominated by multiple factors that all lead to changes in regulatory networks that include transcription factors, epigenetic changes and post-transcriptional modulations. Any disruption of this strict regulation, caused by mutations or other events, affects the proliferation and lineage fidelity of hematopoietic precursors. This may lead to clonal growth of variable significance or leukemogenesis and may possibly affect the treatment sensitivity of the hematological malignancies. For better understanding of hematopoietic regulation we described gene expression changes during physiological development of lymphoid and myeloid lineages and in leukemic specimens using our own simplified real-time PCR based platform. We investigated expression of 95 genes connected with lymphoid and myeloid differentiation or with leukemogenesis in sorted hematopoietic..