Editor’s Note: The research described in this article is the subject of a reported February 2014 investigation by RIKEN. Read more about the concerns about the findings and some researchers’ unsuccessful attempts to replicate the work. The papers were retracted in July 2014.
Creating stem cells may be as simple as dunking cells briefly into a mild acid bath.
Doing so with mouse cells turned them into ultraflexible ones that can grow into any type of body tissue, researchers report in two papers in the Jan. 30 Nature. Other types of stress, such as squeezing cells through narrow glass tubes, can also reprogram cells, Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and Harvard Medical School and her colleagues discovered.