Stem Cell Sunday Update

Stem Cell Sunday Update

Well, there has been very little news of any sort. I wonder if the world is holding its scientific breath and something big will come down the pipes this week…

There’s a nice detailed article about the recent bivalent chromatin discovery by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times. It has the advantage of explaining the biology in layperson’s stems much better than the press releases did! I picked it up in the San Francisco Chronicle. It gives more details about how the chromatin works, and how the Polycomb proteins tag particular parts of it to express or repress genes. The study identifying the bivalent chromatin was done in mice, but work with Polycomb proteins in embryonic stem cells has confirmed that humans share the same cellular structure.

This again is what I see as the significance of embryonic stem cell research—not to find a cure for a particular disease, but to understand more about the fundamental workings of cells and genes. Now that researchers know that embryonic stem cells have bivalent chromatin, they might be able to develop new methods of causing adult stem cells to differentiate into other kinds of cells.

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In other news, the Inside Bay Area website ran a business article about two stem cells companies reporting losses for the first quarter as they increased their spending on hiring and research. It’s not a research story by any means, but it tells a little bit about the kinds of research these two companies are engaged in; Geron is doing research on spinal cord injuries (with embryonic stem cells) and cancer, and StemCells will be using adult stem cells in the widely publicized Batten’s Disease trial to begin within a few months.