Stem Cells

Advance offers promise for bone marrow transplants, gene therapy.

This is the first proof of principle for using adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, combined with gene and cell therapy, for successful disease treatment in mice.

Inhibiting one gene resulted in animals making a head instead of a tail at the site of the wound.

The protein Oct4, which helps to maintain embryonic stem cells, has been shown to be virtually absent in adult stem cells.

The conscripts secrete a protein that fosters cell movement and invasion.

After being injected with just 100 cells, mice develop tumors that metastasize.

Contrary to textbook models, many genes that should be “off” in embryonic stem cells and specialized adult cells remain primed to produce master regulatory proteins, leaving those cells vulnerable to identity changes.

Researchers have manipulated mouse fibroblasts and turned them into cells with such developmental elasticity that they appear identical to embryonic stem cells.

Scientists at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and University of Utah School of Medicine have begun to understand the biological processes of how the planarian flatworm achieves complete regeneration of damaged tissue.

"Regeneration is one of the great mysteries of biology that has puzzled developmental biologists for well over a century," says Whitehead Associate Member Peter Reddien. But that's changing quickly as researchers bring the powerhouses of modern biological analyses to studying these processes-with the hope that a better understanding of regeneration may eventually find medical applications.