Tag Archives: embryonic stem cells

Synthetic biology: Pituitary glands from stem cells

News: Synthetic Biology    November 15, 2011
Research into the uses stem cells is at that stage where almost every month a new application is announced, typically in the replacement of damaged cells or tissues. The most recent application is the creation of pituitary gland tissue from the embryonic stem cells of mice. Researchers at the Japanese RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology [...]
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Stem cell research: Synthetic retina tissue

News: Synthetic Biology    April 13, 2011
This is a ‘Don’t jump to conclusions story.’ Scientists working with the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (Kobe, Japan) and published in the journal Nature, 6 April 2011, Paywall [Self-organizing optic-cup morphogenesis in three-dimensional culture] have announced that mouse embryonic stem cells have been induced to grow a retina-like structure. Let’s parse that last statement: [...]
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Reprogramming cells: The post stem cell future?

Impact: Stem Cells    February 13, 2011
Sixth in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light, alien planets, the microbiome, cell reprogramming, Martian water, the DNA time machine, cosmology and epigenetics. The original articles are now behind a [...]
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The dynamic state of embryonic stem cells

News: Stem Cells    May 29, 2010
Much of the work being done with stem cells is to find how they can be used – repair hearts, grow skin – that sort of thing. Another major effort goes into transforming adult (mature and already differentiated into specific types) cells back into one form or another of stem cell. This was prompted by [...]
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Reversing silenced genes improves quality of induced stem cells

News: Stem Cells    May 17, 2010
As has been the case for more than a decade, the promise of stem cells to create breakthroughs in cell biology and medicine has been hampered by the difficulty in obtaining sufficient quantities of high quality pluripotent stem cells (cells capable of changing into almost any other kind of cell). Human embryonic stem cells are [...]
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