Stem cells are one of the few cell types within the body that have the ability to both self-renew and produce cells that develop into more specialized cell types which eventually built up a functional organ. During development, these cells face the delicate task to switch between these two functions in a timed and programmable manner. One mechanism how stem cells achieve this shift in cell fate is the asymmetric concentration of cell fate determinants during the late stages of cell division, or mitosis, generating two distinct sibling cells. The team from the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) has now investigated how sibling cells with such unequal properties are generated by human neural stem cells. In the study now published in Science Advances, they describe how asymmetric inheritance of a subcellular vesicle compartment, namely lysosomes, influence the localization and activity of one important cell fate determining signaling pathway, the Notch pathway.
