U.S. scientists extract human skin cells directly to make skin stem cells

a U.Steam recently pulled skin cellsdirectly from volunteers,and successfully transformed them into stem cells that are almost comparable to embryonic stem cellsThis brings the study of "skin stem cells", described as one of the most important scientific advances this year, a small step forwardWriting in the latest issue of Nature, George Daley of Harvard Medical School and others saytheir findings are broadly the same
as those of two U.S.-Japanese research groups that first announced the successful extraction of "skin stem cells" in November,using gene reprogramming techniques toimplant a set of four geneinto skin cells,genetically re-arranged to make skin cells functionalBut Daley said they were studying using skin cells extracted directly from volunteers, compared with two previous research teams that used lab-grown human skin cellsDaley says that while it may seem like a small difference, their latest results suggest that it is possible to extract skin cells from anyone for "skin stem cell" research