Caution on Transforming Stem Cells by Acid Baths
April 22, 2014 | Terry Sharrer
Last month, Tagline carried a piece about researchers at RIKEN’s Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan who claimed to have developed a simple method for inducing pluripotency in somatic cells by exposing them to an acid bath. Since then, other researchers have not been able to reproduce those results. Now both RIKEN and Nature, which first published the report, are investigating what happened. While fraud cannot be ruled out, many factors influence stem cell biology and could yet explain the discrepancy. MORE