Normal human cells exhibit a limited replicative life span in culture, eventually arresting growth by a process termed senescence. Progressive telomere shortening appears to trigger senescence in normal human fibroblasts and retinal pigment epithelial cells, as ectopic expression of the telomerase catalytic subunit, hTERT, immortalizes these cell types directly. Telomerase expression alone is insufficient to enable certain other cell types to evade senescence, however. Such cells, including keratinocytes and mammary epithelial cells, appear to require loss of the pRB/p16INK4a cell cycle control mechanism in addition to hTERT expression to achieve immortality. To investigate the relationships among telomerase activity, cell cycle control, senescence, and differentiation, we expressed hTERT in two epithelial cell types, keratinocytes and mesothelial cells, and determined the effect on proliferation potential and on the function of cell-type-specific growth control and differentiation systems. Ectopic hTERT expression immortalized normal mesothelial cells and a premalignant, p16INK4a -negative keratinocyte line. In contrast, when four keratinocyte strains cultured from normal tissue were transduced to express hTERT, they were incompletely rescued from senescence. After reaching the population doubling limit of their parent cell strains, hTERT ؉ keratinocytes entered a slow growth phase of indefinite length, from which rare, rapidly dividing immortal cells emerged. These immortal cell lines frequently had sustained deletions of the CDK2NA/INK4A locus or otherwise were deficient in p16INK4a expression. They nevertheless typically retained other keratinocyte growth controls and differentiated normally in culture and in xenografts. Thus, keratinocyte replicative potential is limited by a p16INK4a -dependent mechanism, the activation of which can occur independent of telomere length. Abrogation of this mechanism together with telomerase expression immortalizes keratinocytes without affecting other major growth control or differentiation systems.

The overexpression of defined transcription factors in somatic cells results in their reprogramming into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells1–3. The extremely low efficiency and slow kinetics of in vitro reprogramming suggest that additional rare events are required to generate iPS cells. The nature and identity of these events, however, remain elusive. We noticed that the reprogramming potential of primary fibroblasts into iPS cells decreases upon serial passaging and the concomitant onset of senescence. Consistent with the notion that loss of replicative potential provides a barrier for reprogramming, we here demonstrate that cells with low endogenous ARF levels and immortal fibroblasts deficient for components of the p16INK4a/ARF/p53 pathway yield iPS colonies with a 3-fold faster kinetics and at a significantly higher efficiency compared with wild-type (WT) cells, endowing almost every somatic cell with the potential to form iPS cells. Importantly, acute genetic ablation of p53 in cellular subpopulations that normally fail to reprogram rescues their ability to produce iPS cells. Our results show that the acquisition of immortality is a crucial and rate-limiting step towards the establishment of a pluripotent state in somatic cells and underscore the similarities between pluripotent cell lines and tumor cells.

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The culture lifetime of epidermal cells of newborn humans is increased from 50 to 150 generations by adding to the medium epidermal growth factor, a polypeptide mitogen. EGF seems to delay senescence of the cells by maintaining them in a state further removed from terminal differentiation. This effect is revealed by a greater ability of the cells to survive subculture and initiate new colonies, but not necessarily by an increased growth rate.

With increasing frequency during serial passage in culture, primary human keratinocytes express p16 INK4A(p16) and undergo senescence arrest. Keratinocytes engineered to express hTERT maintain long telomeres but typically are not immortalized unless, by mutation or other heritable event, they avoid or greatly reduce p16 expression. We have confirmed that keratinocytes undergo p16-related senescence during growth in culture, whether in the fibroblast feeder cell system or in the specialized K-sfm medium formulation, and that this mechanism can act as a barrier to immortalization following hTERT expression. We have characterized the p16-related arrest mechanism more precisely by interfering specifically with several regulators of cell cycle control. Epidermal, oral mucosal, corneal limbal, and conjunctival keratinocytes were transduced to express a p16-insensitive mutant cdk4 (cdk4 R24C ), to abolish p16 control, and/or a dominant negative mutant p53 (p53DD), to abolish p53 function. Expression of either cdk4 R24C or p53DD alone had little effect on life span, but expression of both permitted cells to divide 25 to 43 population doublings (PD) beyond their normal limit. Keratinocytes from a p16؉/؊ individual transduced to express p53DD alone displayed a 31-PD life span extension associated with selective growth of variants that had lost the wild-type p16 allele. Cells in which both p53 and p16 were nonfunctional divided rapidly during their extended life span but experienced telomere erosion and ultimately ceased growth with very short telomeres. Expression of hTERT in these cells immortalized them. Keratinocytes engineered to express cdk4 R24C and hTERT but not p53DD did not exhibit an extended life span. Rare immortal variants exhibiting p53 pathway defects arose from them, however, indicating that the p53-dependent component of keratinocyte senescence is telomere independent. Mutational loss of p16 and p53 has been found to be a frequent early event in the development of squamous cell carcinoma. Our results suggest that such mutations endow keratinocytes with extended replicative potential which may serve to increase the probability of neoplastic progression.The replicative life span of normal human fibroblasts is limited by a senescence mechanism that responds to partial telomere shortening by triggering a p53-and p21 cip1 (p21)-dependent growth arrest (5,8,12). Expression of hTERT, the telomerase catalytic subunit, in presenescent fibroblasts and several other cell types, including retinal pigmented epithelial cells, vascular endothelial cells, and mesothelial cells, is sufficient to permanently evade this senescence mechanism and immortalize these cell types (7,17,78). Recent studies have indicated, however, that telomere shortening alone cannot completely explain the replicative life span limit and immortalization barrier exhibited by a diverse set of epithelial cell types.For keratinocytes (17, 31), mammary epithelial cells (11,21,31,56), bladder urothelial cells (51), and prostate epithelial cells (28, 57)...