File:Future avenues in research of pluripotent cells..jpg

English: The development of high-throughput genome-wide expression analyses has led to the identification of the ES cell transcriptome. There are still several issues that need to be addressed, such as permissive transcription, stochastic gene expression and heterogeneity in the population of undifferentiated ES cells (see text). Insights gained by analyzing the transcriptome of pluripotent cells will feed into, and feed back from, research focusing on: a) the role of pluripotency in vivo, in particular through the study of the function of regulators of pluripotency in PGCs, b) the role of ES cell-like gene expression in cancer, which may lead to development of novel diagnostic and prognostic markers as well as new therapies; and c) the regulation of ES cell self-renewal and differentiation and of somatic cell reprogramming to the pluripotent state.