Published by FASEB on March 1st 2011, scientists have done a new experiment that takes human stem cells form subcutaneous adipose tissue; which is fat, and then they fuse it with muscle cells from a rat's heart. Once they fused the two they discovered that there were new heart muscle cells and it had several nuclei. After being kept in a culture environment the newly formed heart muscle cells were beating! So now, this experiment demonstrates that the rat cells and the human stem cells were communicating in the same genetic language.
Contrary to previous beliefs, this experiment proves that you do not have to genetically modify embryonic genes in adult stem cells to turn them into heart cells. Plus, this new finding could be used for improving the heart, bones, tendons, non-healing wounds, and joints. And said by Gerald Weissmean, M.D. "Much work is still ahead before this method can be applied to humans, but the hope is that this technique might eventually make heart transplants unnecessary".
I think this experiment is really exciting and i can't believe it actually worked. I never thought you could fuse two completely different species cells' together and that they could work correctly. If they successfully can do this in humans than this technique will get rid of the use of transplants and it will save many people's lives.
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