Vitamin C Boosts the Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells

Thursday, December 24, 2009 - 12:49 in Biology & Nature

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to transform human skin cells into stem cells in 2006 came the frustration of actually trying to make a sufficient amount of these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells . The process is so inefficient that scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human skin, or fibroblast, cells to form iPS cell colonies after they infect fibroblasts with the retroviruses used to induce pluripotency. "We almost gave up three years ago," says Dr. Duanqing Pei, director general and professor at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in Guangzhou, China. [More]

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