Research Notes

Stopping Ebola in Its Tracks Richard Preston brought the threat of emerging infectious diseases to the consciousness of his readers in The Hot Zone. The book graphically describes how the Ebola virus causes massive internal bleeding, which kills up to 90 percent of the people it infects. Now National Institutes of Health scientists are making promising advances to stop disease spread. Researchers have identified a viral protein that destroys endothelial cells, the cells that line the blood vess

Written byNadia Halim

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--Nadia S. Halim

In the ongoing quest to chart the human body's storehouses of stem cells, a duo of dermatologists and their co-workers have identified progenitor cells in the "bulge" region of the hair follicle in mice that apparently give rise to both hair and epidermis (G. Taylor et al., "Involvement of follicular stem cells in forming not only the follicle but also the epidermis," Cell, 102:451-61, Aug. 18, 2000). In 1990, Robert M. Lavker, professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Tung-Tien Sun, professor of dermatology at the New York University School of Medicine, traced the progeny of bulge cells downward, where they give rise to the hair shaft. The observation that new skin in severely burned patients arises from surviving hair follicles led them to suspect that perhaps these "young transient amplifying cells" had another talent--regenerating the outer skin layer. ...

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