Cultured Human Embryonic Stem Cells

Cultured Human Embryonic Stem cells.

In this 1 minute and 17 seconds video, a professor was presenting an interesting subject of culturing human embryonic stem cells: embryonic stem cells can develop any type of cells. Human embyonic stem cells were allowed to grow in a cultivated dish, and these cells were able to develop and renew themselves and can differentiate. The interesting development of these cells was that some cells start to spontaneously develope muscles that can beat. These beating muscles are called cardiosites and they are just like the muscles of a human heart. There are different cardiosites and each beat with its own rate. However, these cardiosites are not organized like a human heart. They are made up multiple tiny cells grown in a dish. Although the answer to how do these cells know what to do and when to make cardiosites is still known, it gives rise to new hypothesis that perhaps the cells can further teach us about the normal development of human and a potential treatment for diseases that result from missing cell types.

How this subject is related to this course is that the subject is about cells being regenerate and cultivated. In this class, we’ll be working with bacterial organisms as well as other microbes and we will be growing new colonies in a dish probably the same way as the human embryonic stem cells was grown in. We will learn to hypothesize and test our hypothesis and come up with answers to questions like in the video. Since it’s a Microbiology course, we will be studying lots of different cell types and learn why do cells evolve and develop certain characteristics, and how these developments benefits and/or harm the colonies.

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/media/human_es-lg.mov

Posted by Vy Hoang