Create the niche
July 11th, 2007 by SecureCare“…The new discovery about how human ES cells grow and multiply will create a paradigm shift in how scientists conduct future research, which could someday lead to new therapies for various illnesses.
“The fact that there is a niche for human ES cells, I think, changes how any regenerative medicine that starts with human ES cells would ever occur,”…”If at their most fundamental level, human embryonic stem cells themselves are producing a cell that regulates their decisions on future differentiation, one way of controlling differentiation would be to control the niche.”" Full Slice
July 13th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Journalists overuse and misuse the term “paradigm shift.”
Here there is no paradigm shift. The whole point of a stem cell is to divide asymmetrically so that one daughter cell is a stem cell, and the other can go on to differentiate.
Every other kind of stem cell discovered to date needs a niche - that is, a local environment of other cells that keep signaling the stem cell to avoid differentiating; thus there is nothing new about finding a niche for embryonic stem cells. In fact, since these cells are so poised to differentiate, it is difficult to concoct a reasonable hypothesis of how they COULD be niche-less.
What WOULD be a paradigm shift is definitive evidence that ESCs do NOT need a niche.
July 13th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I just post `em as I get `em (no belief one way or another implied)
All corrections/clarifications welcome