SALT LAKE CITY— In the body, a skin cell will always be skin, and a heart cell will always be heart. But in the first hours of life, cells in the nascent embryo become totipotent: they have the incredible flexibility to mature into skin, heart, gut, or any type of cell.
It was long assumed that the joining of egg and sperm launched a dramatic change in how and which genes were expressed. Instead, new research shows that totipotency is a step-wise process, manifesting as early as in precursors to sperm, called adult germline stem cells (AGSCs), which reside in the testes.