Investigator, Assoc Prof (M) Cancer Center, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

chickens; endocrine disruptors; estradiol; estrogen receptor modulators; estrogens; lentivirus; nuclear proteins; trans-activators The Shioda laboratory is interested in biology and diseases of human germline, which is the specialized population of cells destined to generate sperm or eggs. The germline is solely responsible for conveying the entire genetic information to the next generation. Thus, all heritable, disease-causing genetic mutations occur only in the germline. The first germline cells, which are known as primordial germ cells (PGCs), are observed in human embryos during the third week of gestation as a cluster of only 40 cells, and this is the only single opportunity to generate the germline in each lifespan. Because of the extreme difficulty to obtain human PGCs for research, scientific knowledge of normal biology and mechanisms of genetic damages in human PGCs is very limited. To overcome this restriction, our laboratory has been generating PGC-like cell culture models from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Using these models, we attempt to examine how drugs or environmental factors can introduce disease-causing damages into the genome of human germline.