Year 4/NCE

In this past year we have published a paper describing an improved means of culturing pluripotent stem cells. This advance is useful in that pluripotent cells are the starting material for creating many different types of human cells both for clinical applications and medical research. In addition, we have learned a potential means by which pluripotent stem cells sense physical stimuli from their surroundings such as substrate stiffness and crowding from their neighbors. This information is important in that it improves our understanding of how cells cooperate to form complex tissues and organs, something that happens naturally during embryonic development, but that scientists have struggled to understand and recreate in the laboratory.