The twisted path to pluripotency
On Jan. 29, 2014, the scientific community was stunned by the news that, with a simple 30-minute dip in acid, mouse pluripotent stem cells could be efficiently generated from adult precursor cells. If reproduced and extended to human cells, the findings, detailed in a pair of papers in the journal Nature, promise to be a game changer for stem cell therapeutics, as they offer inducible pluripotent stem cell-like flexibility with none of the concomitant technical difficulty.
“The result is ‘shocking,’ ‘astounding,’ ‘revolutionary,’ and ‘weird,’ said scientists not accustomed to using such exuberant words to describe research findings,” wrote Carolyn Johnson in the Boston Globe.
But within days, excitement over what the researchers called STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) cells moved to dismay amid reports of difficulty in reproducing the method and allegations of scientific misconduct… Read more at BioTechniques.com. (PDF)
Biotechnically Speaking 