Regenerative Medicine
| Producing stem cells has been found to be as simple as exposing cells briefly into a mild acid bath. Doing so with mouse cells turned them into ultraflexible, potentially totipotent ones that can grow into any type of body tissue, or even a full organism. |
It has been discovered that creating stem cells may be as simple as dunking cells briefly into a mild acid bath.
The procedure turned mice cells into ultraflexible ones that can grow into any type of body tissue, researchers report in two papers Nature (1, 2).
It was also found that other types of stress, such as squeezing cells through narrow glass tubes, can also reprogram cells, Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and Harvard Medical School and her colleagues discovered.
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The method has floored other researchers, who thought that creating stem cells required more-complex operations: extracting cells from embryos, transferring the nucleus of an adult cell to an egg cell, or using viruses or other means to introduce factors into the cell that reprogram it to be embryonic-like.
“It’s fascinating. It’s perplexing. It’s potentially profound, but leaves lots of reasons to scratch my head,” says George Daley, the director of stem cell transplantation at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “It’s begging to be replicated,” he says, adding that his lab will attempt to do just that.
In the new study, about 7 to 9 percent of cells from newborn mice survive the acid treatment and take just a week to form primordial cells, dubbed STAP cells for stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency. Pluripotent cells are capable of developing into cells from any tissue. Both embryonic stem cells and reprogrammed cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, are pluripotent.
STAP cells may be even more flexible, Obokata says. When injected into mouse embryos, STAP cells not only incorporate into any body tissue but they can also form parts of the placenta. That’s a feat other pluripotent cells generally can’t accomplish, and it may indicate that STAP cells are totipotent, or capable of forming a complete organism.
Growing STAP cells under different conditions in lab dishes also produced stem cells that could grow into fetal tissues. Slightly different conditions yielded cells resembling placenta precursor cells called trophoblasts.
Obokata and her colleagues transformed blood, skin, brain, muscle, fat, bone marrow, lung and liver cells from newborn mice into STAP cells. The technique worked, but not as well, on cells from older mice, she says.
The researchers have begun testing the acid treatment on human cells.
Further research is needed to show whether STAP cells can compete with other types of stem cells, she says. Regardless of the final outcome, says Louise Laurent, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, “these papers will inspire people to explore less traditional ways of changing a cell’s fate.”
SOURCE Science News
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