Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering

Because a lot of our twitter and diigo posts mention stem cells, I thought it would be a good idea to make a blog post about it.

A lot of good information comes from here:

http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics1.asp

But in summary: 

Stem cells are found in nearly every multi-cellular organism. They are special because they have the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division. They can then differentiate into many types of specialized cells. So a stem cell can change into a lung cell, brain cell, heart cell, etc. They can become tissue or organ-specific cells with special functions.

Stem cells are very important to living organisms. In the blastocyte, the 3- to 5-day-old embryo, the inner cells give rise to the organism's entire body. This includes all of the specialized cell types and organs like the heart, lung, skin, sperm and eggs. In adult tissues like bone marrow, brain, and muscle tissue, populations of adult stem cells have the ability to generate replacements for cells that are lost for any reason, like normal wear and tear or disease.

A diagram of Stem Cells and their modified forms

Now scientists are working to use stem cells for therapy and rebuilding of organisms. There is a lot of work to do, but it is a very popular field, so a lot of work is going into it. There is a bright future in the field of stem cells.

These stem cells are able to generate crucial body parts like hearts, eyes, lungs, and brains. If they can be perfectly understood and used often, then several diseases can be cured. You can read the rest of the blog posts or tweets to see some more examples.

There is so much more to stem cells than I can include in this blog post, plus several studies conducted using them. There's no doubt that future tissue engineering news will include stem cells. 

Of course there is the famous controversy behind it involving the use of fetuses to gather stem cells. It appears to be the biggest setback to this field. However, there is no denying that the future of stem cells is bright