Logic says it has to be the niche. As air and water preceded life, so the niche, that hospitable environment that shelters adult stem cells in many tissues and provides factors necessary to keep them young and vital, must have emerged before its stem cell dependents.

Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have demonstrated for the first time that transplanted muscle stem cells can both improve muscle function in animals with a form of muscular dystrophy and replenish the stem cell population for use in the repair of future muscle injuries.

Researchers have shown that they can put mouse embryonic stem cells to work building the heart, potentially moving medical science a significant step closer to a new generation of heart disease treatments that use human stem cells.

Adult cells of mice created from genetically reprogrammed cells—so-called induced pluripotent stem (IPS) stem cells—can be triggered via drug to enter an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, without the need for further genetic alteration.

In recent years, stem cell researchers have become very adept at manipulating the fate of adult stem cells cultured in the lab. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies achieved the same feat with adult neural stem cells still in place in the brain.

Like the masterless samurai for whom it is named, the protein Ronin chooses an independent path, maintaining embryonic stem cells in their undifferentiated state and playing essential roles in genesis of embryos and their development, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers who reported on this novel cellular regulator in the current issue of the journal Cell.

Scientists at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research have, for the first time, genetically programmed embryonic stem (ES) cells to become nerve cells when transplanted into the brain, according to a study published today in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston are continuing to document the heart's earliest origins. Now, they have pinpointed a new, previously unrecognized group of stem cells that give rise to cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that the activation of a molecular pathway important in stem cell and developmental biology leads to an increase in lung stem cells.

Inspired by a chance discovery during another experiment, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have created a small molecule that stimulates nerve stem cells to begin maturing into nerve cells in culture.

Old muscle got a shot of youthful vigor in a stem cell experiment by bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, setting the path for research on new treatments for age-related degenerative conditions such as muscle atrophy or Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Singapore scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) unveil an atlas that showing the location of "genomic hotspots" of essential protein "switches" (transcription factors) that are critical for maintaining the embryonic stem (ES) cell state.