The quest to design better experiments
Ramya Kumar was starting her doctoral research at the University of Michigan when she was tasked with a frustrating project. Kumar, a chemical engineering student, was working in the lab of professor Joerg Lahann. In 2010, Lahann’s research group described a fully synthetic cell culture plate coating called PMEDSAH, which is capable of supporting indefinite growth and proliferation of human embryonic stem cells in defined media. Previously, stem cell biologists were forced to culture pluripotent stem cells on murine tumor extracts such as Matrigel or on murine embryonic fibroblast monolayers, both of which are chemically undefined and variable. PMEDSAH promised to change the uncertainty of stem cell culture. What wasn’t clear, however, was precisely how to create polymers with a given set of properties… Read more at BioTechniques. (PDF)
Biotechnically Speaking 