Progenitor cell in the context of "Neuroepithelial cell"

In cell biology, precursor cells—also called blast cells—are partially differentiated, or intermediate, and are sometimes referred to as progenitor cells. A precursor cell is a stem cell with the capacity to differentiate into only one cell type, meaning they are unipotent stem cells. In embryology, precursor cells are a group of cells that later differentiate into one organ. However, progenitor cells are considered multipotent.

Due to their contribution to the development of various organs and cancers, precursor and progenitor cells have many potential uses in medicine. There is ongoing research on using these cells to build heart valves, blood vessels, and other tissues by using blood and muscle precursor cells.

Transdifferentiation, also known as lineage reprogramming, is the process in which one mature somatic cell is transformed into another mature somatic cell without undergoing an intermediate pluripotent state or progenitor cell type.(a process where one type of fully developed body cell changes directly into another type of body cell, without the cell turning into a stem cell first) It is a type of metaplasia, which includes all cell fate switches, including the interconversion of stem cells.(it's considered as a form of metaplasia, which refers to any change from one kind of cell to another, including changes involving stem cells.) Current uses of transdifferentiation include disease modeling and drug discovery and in the future may include gene therapy and regenerative medicine.(transdifferentiation is currently used in areas like understanding diseases, testing new drugs, and possibly future treatments such as gene therapy and tissue repair). The term 'transdifferentiation' was originally coined by Selman and Kafatos in 1974 to describe a change in cell properties as cuticle-producing cells became salt-secreting cells in silk moths undergoing metamorphosis.

Myeloid tissue, in the bone marrow sense of the word myeloid (myelo- + -oid), is tissue of bone marrow, of bone marrow cell lineage, or resembling bone marrow, and myelogenous tissue (myelo- + -genous) is any tissue of, or arising from, bone marrow; in these senses the terms are usually used synonymously, as for example with chronic myeloid/myelogenous leukemia.

In hematopoiesis, myeloid cells, or myelogenous cells are blood cells that arise from a progenitor cell for granulocytes, monocytes, erythrocytes, or platelets (the common myeloid progenitor, that is, CMP or CFU-GEMM), or in a narrower sense also often used, specifically from the lineage of the myeloblast (the myelocytes, monocytes, and their daughter types). Thus, although all blood cells, even lymphocytes, are normally born in the bone marrow in adults, myeloid cells in the narrowest sense of the term can be distinguished from lymphoid cells, that is, lymphocytes, which come from common lymphoid progenitor cells that give rise to B cells and T cells. Those cells' differentiation (that is, lymphopoiesis) is not complete until they migrate to lymphatic organs such as the spleen and thymus for programming by antigen challenge. Thus, among leukocytes, the term myeloid is associated with the innate immune system, in contrast to lymphoid, which is associated with the adaptive immune system. Similarly, myelogenous usually refers to nonlymphocytic white blood cells, and erythroid can often be used to distinguish "erythrocyte-related" from that sense of myeloid and from lymphoid.