Tissue engineering triumph: Doctors transplant a trachea made from the patient's own stem cells

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 month 3 weeks (www.lancet.com)

The medical journal Lancet has just announced that doctors have performed the first successful trachea transplant using a trachea crafted from the patient's own stem cells. The New York Times is hailing this as a revolutionary step in regenerative medicine. The surgery took place in Barcelona this past June. Researchers from universities in Spain, Britain and Italy collaborated on the preparation. The patient's original trachea--actually one of her bronchi--had been damaged by severe tuberculosis.

Prof

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Asymmetric Self-Renewal and Commitment of Satellite Stem Cells in Muscle

crackpot submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.cell.com)

"Satellite cells play a central role in mediating the growth and regeneration of skeletal muscle. However, whether satellite cells are stem cells, committed progenitors, or dedifferentiated myoblasts has remained unclear. Using Myf5-Cre and ROSA26-YFP Cre-reporter alleles, we observed that in vivo 10% of sublaminar Pax7-expressing satellite cells have never expressed Myf5

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Transformation of human mesenchymal stem cells increases their dependency on oxidative phosphorylation for energy production

deirdre submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.pnas.org)

“An increased dependency on glycolysis for ATP production is considered to be a hallmark of tumor cells. Whether this increase in glycolytic activity is due mainly to inherent metabolic alterations or to the hypoxic microenvironment remains controversial. Here we have transformed human adult mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) using genetic alterations as described for differentiated cells. Our data suggest that MSC require disruption of the same pathways as have been shown for differentiated cells to confer a fully transformed phenotype

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