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POPSStem Cells 2.0: Scientists Make Revolutionary Advance First paragraph. A while back scientists were making revolutionary breakthroughs in stem cell research. Unfortunately they fell foul of interpretations of thousand year old texts in foreign languages, and a government with the scientific understanding of a squashed grape said "Sorry, our kind and loving God requires that people continue to suffer from Parkinson's, anemia, and various other horrible ailments." Luckily, scientists are awesome and did the obvious thing - make ANOTHER revolutionary breakthrough to get around the problem.
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POPSGenetically engineered cells make their own nanomagnets, providing clear MRI images. If genetically engineering cells to produce their own magnetic nanoparticles proves successful, this provides a new window through which to view many biological processes as they unfold, from the formation of tumors to the migration of stem cells injected to treat disease. "It's just amazing that they can get a mammalian cell to actually make the material," says Lee Josephson, an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Molecular Imaging Research. "I think it's a really meaningful piece of work."
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POPSHow Stem Cells Decide What They'll Become They began by examining populations of seemingly identical blood stem cells, and found that a cell marker of "stemness," a protein called Sca-1, was actually present in highly variable amounts from cell to cell -- in fact, they found a 1,000-fold range. One might think that low Sca-1 cells are simply those cells that have spontaneously differentiated. However, when Huang and Chang divided the cells expressing low, medium and high levels of Sca-1 and cultured them, each descendent cell population recapitulated the same broad range of Sca-1 levels over nine days or more, regardless of what levels they started with. Blood stem cells with low levels of Sca-1 differentiated into red blood cell progenitors seven times more often than cells high in Sca-1 when exposed to erythropoietin, a growth factor that promotes red blood cell production.
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POPSBritish lawmakers back animal-human embryos for research "I believe that we owe it to ourselves and future generations to introduce these measures and in particular to give our unequivocal backing, within the right framework of rules and standards, to stem cell research," Brown wrote in the Observer.
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