• Question: how did you grow the skin in a dish

    Asked by anon-174963 to Ella on 14 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by anon-175336.
    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      We used something called stem cells to grow the skin in a dish. Stem cells are a type of cell that are what we called undifferentiated … this means they can grow into any kind of cell! A brain cell, a heart cell, a kidney cell … they’re amazing! So we put the stem cells in a dish then added different chemicals that made them to turn into the different parts of our skin! We call this directed differentiation. We only added the chemicals for the first few days then a couple of weeks later the stem cells had done all of the work themselves! Stem cells are used a lot in science – they can sometimes be used to help people with cancer!

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