Now to the age-old question.. who is stronger - a man or a woman? Just asking the question will stir up a fierce debate...one that might finally be settled -- thanks to groundbreaking new research... Tonight we are taking you inside a lab where you can actually SEE the differences.. 3 0 - 8 137 - 142 IT'S A QUESTION THAT GOES BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME... WHO'S STRONGER... MEN OR WOMEN? IT'S SOMETHING BRIAN EGWUATU AND HIS WIFE KARA BATTLE OVER ALL THE TIME... ESPECIALLY AT THE GYM. BOTH ARE IN GREAT SHAPE... BUT IN THE END THEY BOTH AGREE... THEY'VE BEEN BROUGHT UP TO BELIEVE MEN ARE THE STRONGER SEX. BUT NOW, LANDMARK RESEARCH BEING DONE BY DOCTOR DORIS TAYLOR AT THE TEXAS HEART INSTITUTE IS PROVING WOMEN... FROM THEIR STEM CELLS TO THEIR HEARTS. HAVE GOT MEN BEAT... BADLY.YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE DIFFERENCE... AND EVEN FEEL IT. 3 TAKE HEARTS FOR EXAMPLE... DR. TAYLOR TOOK MALE AND FEMALE PIG HEARTS... NEARLY IDENTICAL TO THE HUMAN HEART AND STRIPPED THEM OF ALL CELLS... SO SHE COULD LOOK AT THE BASIC STRUCTURE.FIRST THE FEMALE HEART ... JUST LOOK AT IT... NOW, THE MALE HEART...SOFT, LOOSE, THIN WALLED, ALMOST RUNNY.NOW WATCH THE WAY THEY WORK... HOW THEY PUMP WHEN SQUEEZED.AND THE MALE HEART? 3 AND THEN THERE ARE THE STEM CELLS... THE BODY'S SUPER- POWERED REPAIR SYSTEM, LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE! RESEARCH SHOWS THE POWER OF FEMALE STEM CELLS ON THE LEFT COMPARED WITH MALE STEM CELLS ON THE RIGHT.WOMEN HAVE FAR MORE STEM CELLS AND THEY LAST A LOT LONGER. DR. TAYLOR'S GOAL IN ALL OF THIS.RUNS=:01TO HARVEST THOSE "SUPER-POWERERD STEM CELLS" WOMEN HAVE...AND INJECT THEM INTO MEN AND WOMEN, SUFFERING FROM HEART DISEASE, KIDNEY DISEASE, DIABETES AND MORE... AND CURE THEM. Dr. Taylor says all of these differences between male and female hearts and male and female stem cells may explain why men die from heart disease so much younger than women..

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Teruhiko Wakayama alleged yesterday that Haruko Obokata, his co-author of two controversial Nature papers, switched mice in experiments to create stem cells.

A co-author on two controversial papers claiming a new kind of embryonic-like stem cell has presented genetic data showing that the cells used to make the claim were not what they were said to be. The finding was supported by a second source, which suggested that cells made with so-called stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) were probably nothing more than normal embryonic stem cells, possibly the product of switched samples.

Both announcements, made on 16 June, increase pressure on the papers lead author, biologist Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, to prove that the STAP phenomenon does exist.

Obokata and others have agreed to retract two papers describing the STAP techniques they had published in Nature1, 2 in January after numerous problems were identified. [Natures news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.] But the question remained of whether the phenomenon in which stresses such as acid exposure or physical pressure are enough to turn bodily cells into embryonic-like cells was real, as Obokata has steadfastly maintained.

Teruhiko Wakayama, a pioneering mouse cloner currently at Yamanashi University, headed the RIKEN CDB laboratory where Obokata claimed to have created STAP cells. During the experiments, Wakayama gave Obokata newborn mice from his laboratory. She claims to have taken spleen cells from these mice, exposed them to acid to create STAP cells, and handed them to Wakayama. Wakayama took the purported STAP cells and made self-renewing stem cell lines. He also injected them into mouse embryos to make chimeric mice, thus purportedly demonstrating the cells pluripotency, or ability to turn into all of the bodys cell types.

After various problems in the papers emerged, Wakayama started to wonder whether the cells he received had truly been made by the STAP method (see 'Mismatch alleged in acid-bath stem-cell experiment'). He sent the eight stem-cell lines that had been presented in the paper to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) in Chiba, just east of Tokyo, to be analysed. Geneticists at the NIRS targeted the sites where a green fluorescent protein (GFP), used by researchers to mark the expression of certain genes, had been inserted into the mice genomes.

In the mice that Wakayama gave to Obokata, the GFP gene was on the 18th chromosome. But in the purported STAP cells, it was on the 15th chromosome. This strongly suggests that different mice were used. In my laboratory, there are neither mice nor embryonic stem cells with GFP on the 15th chromosome, Wakayama told Nature.

Wakayama is cautious on the interpretation of the results. We cannot say with certainty that STAP cells never existed. While the management of experimental mice is extremely strict at CDB, it is always possible that Obokata brought in baby mice from somewhere, he says.

But similar tests carried out by RIKEN CDB and published at the same time further call into question the origin of the STAP cells. The CDB looked at GFP insertion sites and genetic background in six other purported STAP cell lines that Obokata had kept in her laboratory. The results are in agreement with the results of the analyses of samples held by Prof. Wakayama, CDB director Masatoshi Takeichi wrote in an announcement posted on the centre's website on 16 June. Takeichi notes that the cells with GFP in the 18th chromosome are of unknown provenance. The CDB is now investigating the source of these cells.

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Gene tests suggest acid-bath stem cells never existed

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Newswise DALLAS June 20, 2014 The Childrens Medical Center Research Institute at UTSouthwestern (CRI) has identified a biomarker that enables researchers to accurately characterize the properties and function of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in the body. MSCs are the focus of nearly 200 active clinical trials registered with the National Institutes of Health, targeting conditions such as bone fractures, cartilage injury, degenerative disc disease, and osteoarthritis.

The finding, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell on June 19, significantly advances the field of MSC biology, and if the same biomarker identified in CRIs studies with mice works in humans, the outlook for clinical trials that use MSCs will be improved by the ability to better identify and characterize the relevant cells.

There has been an increasing amount of clinical interest in MSCs, but advances have been slow because researchers to date have been unable to identify MSCs and study their normal physiological function in the body, said Dr. Sean Morrison, Director of the Childrens Research Institute, Professor of Pediatrics at UTSouthwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. We found that a protein known as leptin receptor can serve as a biomarker to accurately identify MSCs in adult bone marrow in vivo, and that those MSCs are the primary source of new bone formation and bone repair after injury.

In the course of their investigation, the CRI researchers found that leptin receptor-positive MSCs are also the main source of factors that promote the maintenance of blood-forming stem cells in the bone marrow.

Unfortunately, many clinical trials that are testing potential therapies using MSCs have been hampered by the use of poorly characterized and impure collections of cultured cells, said Dr. Morrison, senior author of the study and holder of the Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at UTSouthwestern. If this finding is duplicated in our studies with human MSCs, then it will improve the characterization of MSCs that are used clinically and could increase the probability of success for well-designed clinical trials using MSCs.

Dr. Bo Zhou, a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Morrisons laboratory, was first author of the paper. Other CRI researchers involved in the study were Drs. Rui Yue and Malea Murphy, both postdoctoral research fellows. The research was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, and donors to the Childrens Medical Center Foundation.

About CRI

Childrens Medical Center Research Institute at UTSouthwestern (CRI) is a joint venture established in2011 to build upon the comprehensive clinical expertise of Childrens Medical Center of Dallas and the internationally recognized scientific excellence of UTSouthwestern Medical Center. CRIs mission is to perform transformative biomedical research to better understand the biological basis of disease, seeking breakthroughs that can change scientific fields and yield new strategies for treating disease. Located in Dallas, Texas, CRI is creating interdisciplinary groups of exceptional scientists and physicians to pursue research at the interface of regenerative medicine, cancer biology and metabolism, fields that hold uncommon potential for advancing science and medicine. More information about CRI is available on its website: cri.utsw.edu

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Children's Research Institute Finds Key to Identifying, Enriching Mesenchymal Stem Cells

How does a stem cell decide what path to take? In a way, it's up to the wisdom of the crowd.

The DNA in a pluripotent stem cell is bombarded with waves of proteins whose ebb and flow nudge the cell toward becoming blood, bone, skin or organs. A new theory by scientists at Rice University shows the cell's journey is neither a simple step-by-step process nor all random.

Theoretical biologist Peter Wolynes and postdoctoral fellow Bin Zhang set out to create a mathematical tool to analyze large, realistic gene networks. As a bonus, their open-access study to be published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences helped them understand that the process by which stem cells differentiate is a many-body problem.

"Many-body" refers to physical systems that involve interactions between large numbers of particles. Scientists assume these many bodies conspire to have a function in every system, but the "problem" is figuring out just what that function is. In the new work, these bodies consist not only of the thousands of proteins expressed by embryonic stem cells but also DNA binding sites that lead to feedback loops and other "attractors" that prompt the cell to move from one steady state to the next until it reaches a final configuration.

To test their tool, the researchers looked at the roles of eight key proteins and how they rise and fall in number, bind and unbind to DNA and degrade during stem cell differentiation. Though the interactions may not always follow a precise path, their general pattern inevitably leads to the desired result for the same reason a strand of amino acids will inevitably fold into the proper protein: because the landscape dictates that it be so.

Wolynes called the new work a "stylized," simplified model meant to give a general but accurate overview of how cell networks function. It's based on a theory he formed in 2003 with Masaki Sasai of Nagoya University but now takes into account the fact that not one but many genes can be responsible for even a single decision in a cellular process.

"This is what Bin figured out, that one could generalize our 2003 model to be much more realistic about how several different proteins bind to DNA in order to turn it on or off," Wolynes said.

A rigorous theoretical approach to determine the transition pathways and rates between steady states was also important, Zhang said. "This is crucial for understanding the mechanism of how stem cell differentiation occurs," he said.

Wolynes said that because the stem cell is stochastic -- that is, its fate is not pre-determined -- "we had to ask why a gene doesn't constantly flip randomly from one state to another state. This paper for the first time describes how we can, for a pretty complicated circuit, figure out there are only certain periods during which the flipping can occur, following a well-defined transition pathway."

In previous models of gene networks, "Instead of focusing on proteins actually binding to DNA, they just say, 'Well, there's a certain high level of this protein or low level of that protein,'" Wolynes said. "At first, that sounds easier to study because you can measure how much protein you've got. But you don't always know if it is bound. It has become increasingly clear that the rate of protein binding to DNA plays an important role in gene expression, particularly in eukaryotic systems."

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Many bodies prompt stem cells to change