
If you’ve lost your way on the Boston subway, you need only consult a map to find the best route to your destination. Now stem cell engineers have a similar map to guide the making of cells and tissues for disease modeling, drug testing and regenerative medicine. It’s a computer algorithm known as CellNet.
As in this map on the cover of Cell, a cell has many possible destinations or “fates,” and can arrive at them through three main stem cell engineering methods:
• reprogramming (dialing a specialized cell, such as a skin cell, back to a stem-like state with full tissue-making potential)
• differentiation (pushing a stem cell to become a particular cell type, such as a blood cell)
• direct conversion (changing one kind of specialized cell to another kind)
Freely available on the Internet, CellNet provides clues to which methods of cellular engineering are most effective—and acts as a much-needed quality control tool. …