Helen Blau
Scientists have now shown that skin cells can be coaxed to behave like muscle cells and muscle cells like skin cells.
The fickleness of the cells, and the relative ease with which they make the switch, provide a glimpse into the genetic reprogramming that must occur for a cell to become something it’s not.
“We’d all like to understand what happens inside the black box (cell),” said Helen Blau, professor and member of Stanford University‘s Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute and co-author of a new study on the subject.
Harnessing these genetic makeovers will allow scientists to better understand how to induce specialised adult cells to revert to a stem-cell-like state in a process called induced pluripotency (iPS).
But Blau’s experiments suggest an intriguing alternative to iPS: that of enticing specialised adult cells to switch identities without requiring a dip into the stem cell pool.
Blau, who heads the Baxter Lab at Stanford University and her lab members fused mouse muscle cells with human skin cells, to create hybrids called heterokaryons.
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