MAPC adult stem cells shown to be a hoax ...or at least an error

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

This is a simple and concise writeup of the recent scandal involving stem cell research team led by Catherine Verfaille of the University of Minnesota that is accused of falsifying data. As it turns out, some of the inconsistencies in the paper in question were only errors, but it has been confirmed that there was also misrepresentation involved. For example, two of the images accompanying a paper that the team published in the journal Blood, meant to represent the results of different experiments, were actually the same image, flipped and altered

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: embryonic stem cells mesenchymal stem cells politics adult stem cells MAPCs hoaxes stem cells Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research mesenchymal stem cell

Adult stem cells can at least make blood

drunkard submitted, created time 1 year 11 months (www.newscientist.com)

They were hailed as an "ethical" alternative to embryonic stem cells - adult stem cells that can turn into any of the body's tissues. Doubts have grown, but now a prominent sceptic has shown that one claim seems to be true: they form all the cell types found in blood.

Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis demonstrated the existence of multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPCs) in 2002. Isolated from bone marrow, they belong to a class of stem cells that normally form muscle and bone

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: multipotent, stem cell MAPCs bone marrow HSCs

MAPCs , adult progenitor cells ,seems to be much more versatile

Reviver submitted, created time 1 year 11 months (www.newscientist.com)

MAPCs seemed to be much more versatile. Now Verfaillie has teamed up with Irving Weissman of Stanford University in California, who was sceptical of the initial results. They transplanted MAPCs into mice that had been irradiated, wiping out their haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) - another class of marrow cells that give rise to blood. But it's dispointed to see only blood cells were derived.

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: progenitor cells pluripotent cells stem cells bone marrow blood cells MAPCs