Classical definition of SPECIFICATION says:
"cell type is not yet determined and any bias the cell has toward a certain fate can be reversed or transformed to another fate"
Do you agree to this definition?
If yes. Can anyone tell me how do we quantitate the difference between SPECIFICATION and DETERMINATION with an experiment having a perfect positive and negative control and a perfect Null hypothesis to test this concept?
If anyone has come across any paper which specifically test this question, please do tell me about that.
Dear Aritra Misra,
it is usually thought in the field that the fact that you can reproduce an animal out of a differentiated adult cell (as in the case of the sheep Dolly) implies that a determined state according to definition maybe never exists. Of course this has not been proven for all adult cell types. The problem to test this is that there are infinite testing conditions and therefore one can never prove that a differentiated state is truly ditermined, since an untried procedure might prove the opposite. Perhaps we need a weaker definition of what we mean with "determined". No doubt differentiating cells change progressively from less specified to more specified states, and what we usually call determined state just means virtually determined, as long as the cell is not put into quite extraordinary testing conditions occurring with low probability in its standard environment.
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