How sweat glands could help heal skin injuries
Washington:
A team of researchers have determined that under certain conditions, the sweat
gland stem cells could heal skin wounds.
They
have claimed that the glands can also help regenerate all layers of the
epidermis.
USC
faculty member Krzysztof Kobielak and his team used a system to make
all of the sweat gland cells in a mouse easy to spot: labeling them
with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is visible under
ultraviolet light.
Over
time, the GFP became dimmer as it was diluted among dividing sweat gland cells.
After four weeks, the only cells that remained fluorescent were the ones that
did not divide or divided very slowly - a known property among stem cells of
certain tissues, including the hair follicle and cornea.
Therefore,
these slow-dividing, fluorescent cells in the sweat gland's coiled lower region
were likely also stem cells.
Then,
the first author of this paper, graduate student Yvonne Leung, tested whether
these fluorescent cells could do what stem cells do best - differentiate into
multiple cell types.
To
the researchers' surprise, these glowing cells generated not only sweat glands,
but also hair follicles when placed in the skin of a mouse without GFP.
The
study has been published in journal Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE).
25.10.2013
Azad underlines women's health issues in Beijing
New
Delhi: Taking up the issue of the large number of unplanned pregnancies across
the globe, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad Wednesday underlined the
importance of women's sexual and reproductive health while speaking at a
conference in Beijing.
A
staggering 222 million women around the world lack access to contraceptive
services, leading to 80 million unplanned pregnancies, 30 million unplanned
births and 20 million unsafe abortions every year, Azad said while addressing
the "International Inter-ministerial Conference on South-South
Cooperation" in the Chinese capital.
"This
is a reminder that universal access to sexual and reproductive health services
and care is not ensured. It is time we acknowledge that we need to make massive
and strategic investments in universal access to affordable and appropriate
sexual and reproductive health services," Azad said, according to an official
release.
The
minister remarked that child marriages, teenage pregnancies, neglected youth
and adolescent populations, high levels of malnutrition including anaemia and
violence against women are several other issues which need to be addressed to
achieve Millenium Development Goals but have not received due attention so far.
He
said significant progress has been made since the International Conference on
Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994 and preliminary findings show that
globally between 1994 and 2012, fertility fell by 29 percent, contraceptive
prevalence for women aged 15 to 49 rose from 58.4 percent to 63.6 percent and
the unmet need for modern contraceptive methods declined from 20.7 percent to
18.5 percent.
25.10.2013
Pessimist is
the person who says that ‘O’ is the last letter of ZERO instead of the first
letter in OPPORTUNITY
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