RNA offers a safer way to reprogram cells
In recent years, scientists have shown that they can reprogram human skin cells to an immature state that allows the cells to become any type of cell. This ability, known as pluripotency, holds the...
View ArticleA better way to grow stem cells
Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord...
View ArticleMaking stem-cell therapy a reality
For the past two decades, scientists have been trying to fulfill the promise that stem-cell therapy holds for treating diseases such Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and many others. Their ultimate goal is to...
View ArticleWhitehead member, biology professor Rudolf Jaenisch wins National Medal of...
President Barack Obama announced today that Rudolf Jaenisch, a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and professor of biology at MIT, has been named one of the seven...
View ArticleMinimizing background noise in stem cell culture
Cells grown in culture are not alone: They are constantly communicating with one another by sending signals through their culture media that are picked up and transmitted by other cells in the media....
View ArticleStem cells could drive hepatitis research forward
Hepatitis C, an infectious disease that can cause inflammation and organ failure, has different effects on different people. But no one is sure why some people are very susceptible to the infection,...
View ArticleRolling in the chip
Cell rolling is a common mechanism cells use to navigate through the body. During inflammation, for example, the endothelial cells that line blood vessels present certain molecules that attract white...
View ArticleCrowding causes cells to produce an orderly matrix of molecules
When researchers conduct experiments on the way cells grow and respond to outside cues, they tend to use solutions that are much more dilute than the crowded environments found inside living cells....
View ArticleTracking stem cell reprogramming
Several years ago, biologists discovered that regular body cells can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells — cells with the ability to become any other type of cell. Such cells hold great promise...
View ArticleProbing matters of the heart
The fate of an embryonic stem cell, which has the potential to become any type of body cell, is determined by a complex interaction of genes, proteins that bind DNA, and molecules that modify those...
View ArticlePrecisely engineering 3-D brain tissues
Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, MIT and Harvard Medical School (HMS) engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create three-dimensional...
View ArticlePutting the squeeze on cells
Living cells are surrounded by a membrane that tightly regulates what gets in and out of the cell. This barrier is necessary for cells to control their internal environment, but it makes it more...
View ArticleCardiac development needs more than protein-coding genes
When the human genome was sequenced, biologists were surprised to find that very little of the genome — less than 3 percent — corresponds to protein-coding genes. What, they wondered, was all the rest...
View ArticleMcGovern Institute hands out neuroscience award
The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT has announced that Thomas Jessell of Columbia University is the winner of the 2013 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The $100,000 prize, which...
View ArticleResearchers unlock a new means of growing intestinal stem cells
Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have shown that they can grow unlimited quantities of intestinal stem cells, then stimulate them to develop into nearly pure populations of different...
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