“Don’t judge a cell by its cover” has turned out to be sage advice for stem cell scientists. They have discovered a new class of cells, generated from mouse tissue, that can be reprogrammed to become almost any cell in the body.
Called F-class cells for their fuzzy appearance in a petri dish, they were probably overlooked in the past because they don’t look like ordinary stem cells. But experiments suggest they have similar powers of flexibility. The F-class cells are described in two papers appearing December 11 in Nature by a worldwide stem cell research collaborative called Project Grandiose.