Your Short-Order Stem Cells May Not Have Arrived After All!

A few weeks ago I blogged about a Japanese researcher's piece in Nature, in which she claimed to have induced pluripotency in mouse blood cells simply by immersing the cells in an acid bath for a half-hour.  It now emerges that the researcher, Haruko Obokata, may not have done this after all. The RIKEN center in Kobe announced on Friday that it is investigating "alleged irregularities" in her work. Questions have been raised about the use of duplicate images across several of her papers, and about numerous unsuccessful attempts to duplicate her results. Obokata is not answering press inquiries. The jury is very much still out: the failures to duplicate her results may simply be due to the complexity of her protocol and the character of the particular cells she used. The business about duplicate images may simply have been a mistake. Read the latest from Nature on the matter, and stay tuned.

Your Short-Order Stem Cells Have Arrived!

A Japanese research team has discovered a way to render somatic cells (in this case, blood cells) pluripotent, simply by bathing them in acid for under a half-hour. The pluripotent cells were generated in a mouse model, and when injected into a mouse embryo, contributed to all three of the developing embryo's tissue-types. They also exhibited stem-cell like growth capacity when cultivated with growth factors. The team are calling their creation STAP stem-cells, for "stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency." The new method involved no nuclear transfer and no introduction of transcription factors.

If the method works in humans, it could be the key to practical regenerative medicine. A person in need of replacement pancreatic cells, for example, might be able to give blood or other tissue to scientists who could then, very quickly, create pluripotent cells from them, and then develop these into replacement tissue which would not be rejected by the recipients body.

This story in the New Scientist has a lot of excellent detail, but includes a side allegation that an unnamed collaborator of the researchers permitted some STAP cells to grow into "spherical clusters" and then implanted one of these into a mouse uterus. According to the story, a researcher's "understanding" was that the collaborator's experiment resulted in the creation of an embryo. The unnamed collaborator hasn't commented. This would be a big deal, as it would indicate that STAP stem-cells were actually STAT stem cells (totipotent, not just pluripotent), and it would constitute an embryonic cloning without nuclear transfer.

Mouse Sperm Grown in Culture, Press Overreacts

This article from the Asian Journal of Andrology reveals that a German/Israeli team of researchers has been able to grow murine testicular cells in a soft agar culture system, and differentiate them to the point where they appear like morphologically normal spermatozoa. That is: they can take pre-sperm cells from mouse testes and grow them until they look like real, functional sperm cells. This is amazing news, but not as amazing as some journalists have made it seem. The Daily Mirror and the Telegraph said this could lead to in-lab production of human sperm "soon." Well, okay--depending on what you mean by "soon." JotZoom went with the present tense: "The latest news reports reveal more details about sperm grown in laboratory as a real scientific breakthrough. Infertile men are no longer deprived of the unique experience of becoming the father of a child using their own sperms." And the Times of India headlined the story, "Way to beat male infertility found." CBS used the Telegraph's reporting to do a more careful story, here. NHS splashes some appropriate cold water here.