Cell Conversion

A research published in the journal ‘Nature Genetics’ states that scientists have developed a system that predicts how to directly transform any human cell type into another.

The new system ‘Mogrify’ is a bioinformatics resource that will help experimental biologists to bypass the need to create stem cells. Its developers are of the view that the pluripotent stem cells (cells that can be generated directly from adult cells) can be used to treat different medical conditions and diseases. Artificial pluripotent stem cells were first created in 2007 and since then, scientists have made little progress to convert human cells. Mogrify overcomes this barrier by predicting how to create any human cell type from any other cell type directly. Scientists tested this system on two new human cell conversions and succeeded in the very first time.

The success of Mogrify will entail the creation of a great number of human cell types in a lab. This will lead to tissue therapies of all kinds that could help in treating arthritis, macular degeneration, heart diseases and so on. Moreover, its understanding at the molecular level would allow scientists to grow organs from somebody’s own cells. During the experiment, a computational algorithm was developed to predict the cellular factors for cell conversions.