The procedure itself sounds simple enough, if you sort of ignore the fact that scientists are digging around inside of a rat’s skull. Oxford’s Edman Tang and his team first coated magnetic nanoparticles with antibodies that have a tendency to bond with a type of protein found on neural stem cells. After about six hours, the researchers used a magnet to pull the nanoparticles together, and then extracted them from the brain using a syringe. Amazingly, none of this appears to have damaged the rat’s brain, and the neural stem cells grew freely in a petri dish once extracted.
via Gizmodo
October 4, 2013
