What keeps stem cells pluripotent? In the past six months researchers have reprogrammed human progenitor skin cells and fully-differentiated Beta cells back into a pluripotent state. Despite these advances, little is known so far about how pluripotency is regulated. To find out, researchers have set their sights on a group of mammalian regulator genes known as the Polycomb Complex,... Click to continue

A University of Georgia (UGA) microbiologist and whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency is suing the university Board of Regents, the university research foundation, and five faculty members for accepting federal grant money to publish fraudulent research, according to court documents.

David Lewis, an adjunct professor in the university department of ecology, conducted EPA-funded research in the 1990s on the harmful effects of sewage sludge, and in 1996 wrote a commentary in... Click to continue

Partially or fully differentiated cells can acquire, or be reprogrammed for, stem cell-like pluripotency, according to two studies published this week.

The research adds to a growing body of work on the subtleties of pluripotency, since last November's landmark somatic cell reprogramming achievement.

The first group, led by Rudolph Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute,... Click to continue

Last week, the University of Nevada, Reno, fired and banned from campus an animal nutrition researcher, according to a university spokesperson.

Hussein Hussein, associate professor in the department of animal biotechnology, told the Reno-Gazette Journal: "I was fired by President (Milton) Glick and escorted from my office by campus police as if I were a criminal." Hussein also said he... Click to continue

With biotech companies inching up on clinical trials for human embryonic stem cell-based therapies, the US Food and Drug Administration held a meeting yesterday to discuss scientific issues in properly deriving and characterizing the cells, as well as appropriate clinical trial monitoring.

Three biotechs, Geron Corporation, Advanced Cell Technology, and Novocell presented some of their scientific work on spinal cord injury, vision impairment, and diabetes, respectively, at the meeting. Geron... Click to continue

Today (April 7) is the start day of the National Institutes of Health mandate requiring that all research funded by NIH dollars be deposited into PubMed Central within one year of publication.

Any articles arising from NIH funds that are accepted for publication starting today must be submitted to the database. The policy is part of a mandate issued in January by the NIH in accordance with the Congressional appropriations bill for... Click to continue

Hundreds of bacteria isolated from soil samples are able to live exclusively on antibiotics as a food source, according to a report published today (April 3) in Science.

The researchers, led by George Church of Harvard Medical School, isolated bacteria from 11 distinct soil types. They showed that these bacteria could subsist in culture dishes exclusively on, in some cases,... Click to continue

Can the blogosphere work as well as the traditional peer review system? Over the past two months one researcher has been trying to find out. Based on his and his publisher's early assessment of the experiment, using blog-based peer reviewing is only partially helpful, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today.

The experiment was run by University of California, San... Click to continue