Stem Cell Cup: California Embryonics vs Massachusetts Oldies: $3 vs $1.25 Billion

While people in California can think they are in the centre of the (embryonic) stem cell universe due to Proposition 71’s $3 Billion and the invasion of good scientists into the West Coast, Massachusetts academic and biotech people also are thinking along those lines, so state officials quickly set up a $1.25 Billion package for funding stem cell research in the very state and “establishing the first stem cell bank, a repository of all the stem cell lines created in Massachusetts laboratories, which would serve as a kind of stem cell lending library to scientists around the world. “

Links:

Massachusetts floats $1 bln stem cell research plan (Reuters)

Massachusetts Proposes Stem Cell Research Grants (New York Times)

2 models of embryonic and adult blood formation: Figure by Ueno and Weissman

If you have previously thought (in your spare time) that the conventional wisdom concerning blood formation is that the yolk sac’s embryonic blood-forming cells serve only the embryo, while the source of adult blood-forming stem cells is the region called aorta-gonad-mesonephros (AGM), it’s time to think it again due the elegant experiments of Samokhalov et al.: Cell tracing shows the contribution of the yolk sac to adult haematopoiesis Nature 446, 1056-1061 (26 April 2007)

Legend: a, The ’separate’ model.

The DNA Network wants you to join other life science enthusiasts…

and burn the feeds together. Founders behind: Ricardo Vidal of My Biotech Life and Hsien Hsien Lei from Eye on DNA. Link