One of the dreams of biomedical scientists is to be able to transform adult cells into other kinds of cells. And thus avoid some of ____1____ of working with ____2____ stem cells. Now a research team from McMaster University in Ontario has announced that they’ve been able to transform human skin cells into blood cells. The work was published online on November 7th by the journal Nature.
Other research in this area has required that cells of one type first be returned to a more generally ____3____ stem cell state, which can introduce fresh problems. Once there, the cell is then turned into the type of tissue the researchers seek. But in this case, the scientists avoided the middleman cell. The skin was changed directly into what appears to be functional adult human blood cells. The technique involves ____4____ by a virus vector and exposure to numerous regulatory proteins.
The cells have not been tested in humans to see if they’re truly ____5____ from the home-grown kind. But the research is another step in the effort to create needed cell types from easily available ones.
【視聽版科學(xué)小組榮譽出品】
the ethical concerns embryonic undifferentiated gene insertion indistinguishable
生物醫(yī)學(xué)領(lǐng)域的科學(xué)家有一個夢想,那就是將成年細(xì)胞轉(zhuǎn)化成其他類型的細(xì)胞,這就可以避免一些因使用胚胎干細(xì)胞引起的倫理問題。如今,安大略省麥克馬斯特大學(xué)的一個研發(fā)小組宣稱他們可以將人類皮膚細(xì)胞轉(zhuǎn)化成血細(xì)胞。這項研究在11月7日由《自然》雜志在網(wǎng)上發(fā)表。 此領(lǐng)域的其他研究實驗都是先逆分化某種類型的細(xì)胞,將其變回一般未分化的干細(xì)胞狀態(tài),而這過程可能會引起一些新問題。一旦細(xì)胞逆分化成干細(xì)胞,干細(xì)胞就可以分化成某種研究者想要的組織。但馬斯特大學(xué)研發(fā)小組的科學(xué)家卻沒有利用中途轉(zhuǎn)化的干細(xì)胞,而是直接將皮膚細(xì)胞轉(zhuǎn)化成能發(fā)揮功能的成人血細(xì)胞。這項技術(shù)需要用到植入新基因病毒載體和多種調(diào)控蛋白。 科學(xué)家尚未證實這些細(xì)胞在人體內(nèi)是否自身血細(xì)胞沒有任何區(qū)別,但此次研究在探索簡易獲取所需細(xì)胞的道路上邁出了一步。