It’s Friday. TGIF….although of course the stem cells will be growing, experiments going, the grants and papers continue being written, and data still analyzed on Saturdays and Sundays too in the stem cell field. Stem cells are not a Mon-Fri, 9-5 kind of universe, but most of you reading this blog know that. It seems like the last few weeks have brought an unusually high level of mainstream media coverage of the stem cell field with big headlines and big stories. What to make …Read More
chemical reprogramming
Sheng Ding’s lab reports today in Cell Stem Cell (you can read it here) that they have replaced all genetic factors in a new iPS cell reprogramming method except Oct4. The other factors were replaced by chemical compounds. Thus, we continue a major transition in the iPS cell field away from genes and toward chemicals. This work is very exciting. Even with the advent of totally RNA-based iPS cell formation, progress toward a completely chemical approach is quite important. Many believe that an entirely …Read More