Medical visualization taken from human scanned data showing a unipotent stem cell, one of the first stages in erythropoiesis (red blood cell production). In the process of erythropoiesis, a hemocytoblast or pluripotent hematopoietic stem cell becomes a myeloid progenitor stem cell or multipotent stem cell, which will develop into a unipotent stem cell. From there the stem cell goes through several more stages of development before transforming into a normoblast, erythroblast, then reticulocyte, and finally an erythrocyte. Unipotent stem cells, as the name suggests, can only develop into one type of specialized cell. Although unipotent stem cells have such limited differentiation possibilities, they are very resilient and can self-renew, which makes this type of cell useful in the treatment of disease and tissue regeneration. |