New Single-Cell Analysis Reveals Complex Variations in Stem Cells

December 8, 2014

(Nanowerk) – Stem cells offer great potential in biomedical engineering due to their pluripotency, which is the ability to multiply indefinitely and also to differentiate and develop into any kind of the hundreds of different cells and bodily tissues. But the precise complexity of how stem cell development is regulated throughout states of cellular change has been difficult to pinpoint until now. By using powerful new single–cell genetic profiling techniques, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Boston Children’s Hospital have uncovered far more variation in pluripotent stem cells than was previously appreciated.