Prospect of Stem Cells in Bone Tissue Engineering: A Review

Figure 1

The ability of MSCs in the bone marrow cavity to self-renew (curved arrow) and to differentiate (straight, solid arrows) towards the mesodermal lineage (including bone cell). The reported ability to transdifferentiate into cells of other lineages (ectoderm and endoderm) is shown by dashed arrows, as transdifferentiation is controversial in vivo. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Nature Reviews Immunology, Uccelli et al. [32], copyright © 2008.