Today’s Popular Posts
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Popular Posts
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Posts in this Impact Area: (Stem Cells)
- ePSC: A new type of pluripotent stem cell
- Stem cell injection improves aging cells in mice
- Stem Cells: An excellent coverage of the medical reality
- Reprogramming cells: The post stem cell future?
- First steps: Converting skin cells to blood cells without stem cells
- First clinical trial: Embryonic stem cells for spinal repair
- Stem Cells: Using RNA to reprogram adult cells
- Stem cells: Myc does much more
- The dynamic state of embryonic stem cells
- Reversing silenced genes improves quality of induced stem cells
- Growing stem cells to become hair cells of the inner ear
- Neural stem cells: Going back to a brain with more plasticity
- New transplantation method: Organ + stem cells
- Finally(?)…artificially making blood stem cells in quantity
- Induced stem cells: Not such good news…
- New method: Creating stem cells from fat cells
- Stem cell epigenomic development mapped
- Why do some cancers resist treatment?
- The potentially polymorphous cell (a revolution in the making?)
- Stem cells to neurons to live transplant
- Research finding: Possibly a new way to create stem cells
- Watch for impact: Stem cells in China
- A new type of stem cell: Dermal
- Amniotic stem cells show more promise
- Studying infertility using laboratory created germ cells
- The race for safe stem cells
- Stem cell converts
- Skin cells – to stem cells – to liver cells
- Father's goat
- Stem cells from the umbilical cord

New method: Creating stem cells from fat cells
Creating stem cells from adult cells – rather than using controversial embryonic material – is near the top of the list for stem cell research. So creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS – cells that can become almost any other kind of cell) from fat cells (yes, human fat cells, of which there is no short supply) would seem to be a good ticket. In fact, one of the researchers involved, Mark Kay of Stanford University School of Medicine (California, USA), was heard to say, “Why didn’t we think of this sooner?”
Of course, turning fat cells into stem cells is not simple. In the case of this research, it resulted from a fortunate combination of skills and knowledge.
Kay’s ‘minicircles’ are DNA elements arranged in microscopic rings. These can be injected into the body of a cell to look and work somewhat like the cell’s own plasmids (circular DNA molecules found outside of the cell nucleus). The minicircles then direct the cell’s RNA to produce DNA, RNA, or other proteins for therapeutic effect. This is a proven technique that has a great virtue in not using viruses to reprogram DNA/RNA (viruses being difficult to safely filter and control). However, the technique had not been used before to reprogram adult cells into stem cells.
The minicircles were applied to fat cells because Wu’s and Longaker’s research had shown this type of adult cell to have a good DNA configuration for reprogramming and was relatively easy to isolate.
The final experiments with minicircles and fat cells, done in vitro (in a Petri dish), showed that stem cells were created at the rate of about 0.005% of cells – a low rate compared to other techniques, but given the plenitude of fat cells, not a problem for production. The stem cells produced appear to have no differences from pluripotent cells from other sources.
As time will tell, if this method for producing stem cells is viable and scalable (can be done in large quantities), then it is indeed a major step toward making stem cells available for many kinds of diagnostic and therapeutic applications.