Roles of vitamins in stem cells

Stem cells can differentiate to diverse cell types in our body, and they hold great promises in both basic research and clinical therapies. For specific stem cell types, distinctive nutritional and signaling components are required to maintain the proliferation capacity and differentiation potential in cell culture. Various vitamins play essential roles in stem cell culture to modulate cell survival, proliferation and differentiation. Besides their common nutritional functions, specific vitamins are recently shown to modulate signal transduction and epigenetics. In this article, we will first review classical vitamin functions in both somatic and stem cell cultures. We will then focus on how stem cells could be modulated by vitamins beyond their nutritional roles. We believe that a better understanding of vitamin functions will significantly benefit stem cell research, and help realize their potentials in regenerative medicine.