• Question: you said that you grew cells; where did the cells come from?

    Asked by Arun to Dawn on 23 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      For most of our work, our cells are bought from an organisation in America who supply many science labs with many different types of cells.

      We can also extract neurons (nerve cells in the brain) from mice or rats, although I don’t tend to work with these.

      And for some other work, we get induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons from another research group in London. Originally from a skin biopsy, the cells are “de-programmed” to become stem cells (which have the ability to become any other type of cell), and then “re-programmed” to become neurons. These are really useful tools for our research but they’re very hard to maintain and take ages to make (sometimes YEARS)!

Comments