Milk is a wholesome food, contains nutritional and non-nutritional elements. Nutritional elements like carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals provide building blocks of cell and tissue growth of not only to the young ones but to the adult and elderly humans. Non-nutritional components may include non-cellular biomolecules like immunoglobulins, cytokines and antimicrobials, while the cellular component include various cell types mainly inflammatory cells, lactocytes, and stem cells. Cellular components of milk may provide direct or indirect non-nutritional elements required for the growth of young ones. Of these various cellular components, existence of stem cells in milk are of particular interest. The presence of stem cells in the milk was reported earlier in human [1,2] and later in murine and bovine [3,4]. Molecular characteristics of milk-derived stem cells were positive for hematopoietic stem cell markers (CD34+, CD133+, and CD 123+), mesenchymal stem cell markers (CD90+, CD44+, CD271+, and CD146+) [5], endothelial progenitor cell marker (CD105+) and embryonic stem cell markers (OCT4+, SOX2+, NANOG+, and TRA 60-1+) [1]. Cellular characteristic of milk-derived stem cells includes multipotency in vitro assay and demonstrated adipogenic, chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation capacity, suggesting the possibility of utilizing these special cells for therapeutic applications [4]. About 30 - 40% of cells of bovine milk were immunopositive with mesenchymal makers - CD90+, CD73+ and CD105+ and pluripotent stem cell markers- SOX2+ and OCT4+ [4].

References

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Citation

Citation: Ratan K Choudhary and Feng-Qi Zhao. “Re-Evaluation of Milk Components and Stem Cells". Acta Scientific Veterinary Sciences 3.1 (2021): 01-02.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Ratan K Choudhary and Feng-Qi Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.