The STAP stem cells case has been extensively studied this year. A group of Japanese researchers published in Nature their investigation on the synthesis of newly-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) by bathing somatic cells in acid. However, some researches didn’t agree with their work and decided to reproduce the experience. In this way, Kenneth Lee, one of those scientists opposed to the Japanese researchers’ work, decided to blog his process of reproducing it. Almost from the beginning, Kenneth was faced with a lack of information and detail about the experiment in the original paper. In addition, most of the information was erroneous and what is worse, the protocol was insufficient. Despite these problems, he continued the reproduction using an updated method and publishing all the results in his blog, giving cause for an open discussion among scientists.
Recently, a summary of Kenneth Lee’s research was published in F1000Research, where all data enclosed revealed that the use of white blood cells isolated from the spleen of neonatal mice and lung fibroblasts made it impossible for him to obtain the same results from the original work.
No iPS cell markers after acid treatment. Image from article
This article has been pre-checked and is waiting the validation of peer reviewers. All the procedure will be detailed in the article and posterior reviews will be included in PubMed and other databases.
Now you can read all the research and the extra information on the article page. Moreover, you can write comments about the experience and track all the new information available. The page also offers the related data sets necessary to do the analysis.
Written by Dr. David Alcantara and Paula Ruíz for The All Results Journals.
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