Description:

Over the past two years, our understanding of how self-renewal, proliferation and differentiation are balanced within stem cell compartments in vivo has undergone a significant revolution. These recent studies challenge our conventional views connecting self-renewal and multi-lineage potency, and indeed our notions of in vivo clonality per se. As the result, these studies shed new light on key issues as diverse as aging, myelodysplasia and aplasia in hematopoiesis, as well as having broad impact on our understanding of tissue-specific development and homeostasis in general.

Dr. Camargo will first discus recent in vivo studies of hematopoietic clonal persistence in vivo. These studies suggest a new paradigm for understanding basal hematopoiesis and the stress responses created by stem cell transplantation, both experimentally and in the clinic.

Dr. Milsom will then discuss recent findings of how stem cell replication per se engenders metabolic and genomic stress, which links directly to clonal damage, susceptibility to mutation and exhaustion.

Dr. Jongmans will present fascinating evidence that clonal stress and dysfunction can lead not only to hematopoietic deterioration, but also to correction of clonal abnormalities, thus exhibiting positive clonal evolutionary selection within one organismal generation.