Sodium Butyrate

Sodium Butyrate is the sodium salt of butyric acid, a short chain fatty acid that inhibits histone deacetylases (HDACs), leading to hyperacetylation of histones. This causes changes in chromatin structure and gene expression, resulting in many biological effects. (Boffa et al.; Kruh)

REPROGRAMMING

• Promotes reprogramming of human somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using only a single factor, OCT4 (Zhu et al.).

MAINTENANCE AND SELF-RENEWAL

• Supports self-renewal of mouse and human embryonic stem (ES) cells, in the absence of exogenously added growth factors (Ware et al.).

DIFFERENTIATION

• Promotes differentiation to hepatocytes from mouse and human ES cells (Hay et al.; Zhou et al.).
• Promotes differentiation to definitive endoderm and islet-like cells from human ES cells (Jiang et al.).
• Enhances osteogenic and suppresses adipogenic differentiation from human mesenchymal cells (Chen et al.; Lee et al.).