Team finds potential marker of long-term HSCs

The researchers were also able to solve another mystery by showing where in the bone marrow long-term HSCs reside.

Satoshi Yamazaki, PhD, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi, MD, PhD, both from the University of Tokyo in Japan, used new technology to prepare bone marrow tissue and do computational analyses that validated the location and architecture of the HSC niche.

“More than 90% of these cells reside on a particular type of blood vessel called venous sinusoids,” Dr Nakauchi said.

The researchers believe the ability to identify long-term HSCs will give scientists a powerful tool for further study.

“This opens the way to observe long-term HSCs and other cells in the niche as they exist in the body, without transplanting them,” Dr Weissman said. “This is how science works, by getting down to the purest irreducible element—in this case, blood stem cells—in order to develop new tools and understandings.”