Human stem cells converted to functional lung cells. For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells. The advance, reported by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, has significant potential for modeling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation. The study was published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology. "Researchers have had relative success in turning human stem cells into heart cells, pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells, and nerve cells, raising all sorts of possibilities for regenerative medicine," said study leader Hans-Willem Snoeck, MD, PhD, professor of medicine (in microbiology & immunology) and affiliated with the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology and the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative.
"Now, we are finally able to make lung and airway cells. The research builds on Dr. In the current study, Dr. Microtubules: Power to the Body | NIGMS. We might have enjoyed a day off from our jobs this Labor Day, but our cellular workers never rest. While you relaxed at the beach or fired up the grill, mitochondria generated your cells' power supplies, lysosomes took out the trash and ribosomes churned out proteins that'll go on to do even more tasks. Other microscopic employees, microtubules, will work many jobs. These strong protein filaments make up part of the cell’s skeleton and serve as tracks for shuttling internal cargo. When cells divide, it’s microtubule fibers that physically pull the chromosomes into each daughter cell.
Microtubules perform these important tasks by repeatedly growing and shrinking. Until recently, scientists didn’t know exactly what drove microtubules to fall apart. The team also learned that Taxol, a common cancer drug, relieves the pressure and allows microtubules to remain intact indefinitely. The research reported in this article was funded in part under NIH grant P01GM051487. Also in this series: Stem cells made with near-perfect efficiency. Hanna Lab Cells can now be made pluripotent on a tight schedule and with high efficiency.
Researchers have for the first time converted cultured skin cells into stem cells with near-perfect efficiency. By removing a single protein, called Mbd3, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was able to increase the conversion rate to almost 100% — ten times that normally achieved. The discovery could clear the way for scientists to produce large volumes of stem cells on demand, hastening the development of new treatments In 2006, scientists first showed that mature cells could be reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells — capable of growing indefinitely and of becoming any type of cell in the body, a property known as pluripotency. But the production of these induced pluripotent stem cells remained mysteriously inefficient. Low cell-conversion rates have thwarted efforts to study how the process, called reprogramming, happens.
Scientists study how complexity developed from simple cell. (Phys.org) —Consider this a matter of scrambling down the family tree to its roots. Really old roots. Or perhaps it's more like blowing the dust off the family album—the human album—and opening to the first pages billions of years ago. Naomi Ward, an associate professor in the University of Wyoming Department of Molecular Biology, is the senior author on a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research examines how simple bacterial cells could have made the transition to more complex cells, leading to plants, animals and humans. The paper, titled "Spatially segregated transcription and translation in cells of the endomembrane-containing bacterium Gemmata obscuriglobus," was published online this week.
Ekaterina Gottshall, a graduate student in the Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences Ph.D. program, is first author on the paper and main contributor to the experimental work. More information: Ekaterina Y. Scientists grow tiny beating human hearts to give them heart disease and find a cure. (Medical Xpress)—Miniature human hearts that beat of their own accord are being grown by scientists at Abertay University.
They have been developed specifically to find a cure for heart hypertrophy - a form of heart disease that can lead to sudden death. Made from stem cells, the tiny hearts are just 1mm in diameter and contract at around 30 beats per minute. Although healthy to begin with, the scientists are using chemicals to simulate the physiological conditions that will make them become hypertrophic - enlarged, due to abnormal growth of the cells that make up the heart (cardiomyocytes). Once diseased, the hearts are then treated with newly developed medications to see if they can prevent the damage from occurring.
Professor Nikolai Zhelev, who is leading this research, explains: "Although human hearts have been grown in labs before, this is the first time it has ever been possible to induce disease in them. Professor Bown explains: Using geometry, researchers coax human embryonic stem cells to organize themselves | Newswire. About seven days after conception, something remarkable occurs in the clump of cells that will eventually become a new human being. They start to specialize. They take on characteristics that begin to hint at their ultimate fate as part of the skin, brain, muscle or any of the roughly 200 cell types that exist in people, and they start to form distinct layers.
Although scientists have studied this process in animals, and have tried to coax human embryonic stem cells into taking shape by flooding them with chemical signals, until now the process has not been successfully replicated in the lab. But researchers led by Ali Brivanlou, Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor and head of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Molecular Embryology at The Rockefeller University, have done it, and it turns out that the missing ingredient is geometrical, not chemical. Growth pattern. The research was published June 29 in Nature Methods. Reconstructing the life history of a single cell.
Researchers have developed new methods to trace the life history of individual cells back to their origins in the fertilised egg. By looking at the copy of the human genome present in healthy cells, they were able to build a picture of each cell's development from the early embryo on its journey to become part of an adult organ. During the life of an individual, all cells in the body develop mutations, known as somatic mutations, which are not inherited from parents or passed on to offspring. These somatic mutations carry a coded record of the lifetime experiences of each cell. By looking at the numbers and types of mutations in a cell's DNA, researchers were able to assess whether the cell had divided a few times or many times and detect the imprints, known as signatures, of the processes of DNA damage and repair that the cells had been exposed to during the life of the individual.
The team looked at mouse cells from the stomach, small bowel, large bowel and prostate.