In March, we were thrilled to see one of our newest and most innovative projects featured in the Guardian.
The Poo Zoo was co-designed with Stem Cell Workshop participant and steering committee member Professor Suzannah Williams of the University of Oxford and involves an exciting collaboration with Chester Zoo.
This high-risk/high-reward project aims to bypass some of the hurdles associated with obtaining cell cultures from endangered species by establishing a filtration toolkit to derive clean cell cultures from scat samples. This team is sampling poo from some of the special animals at Chester Zoo in the UK, including elephants, giraffes, okapis, and sun bears, and washing it to extract and grow any living cells deposited inside.
The ability to obtain cell lines from animal poo will be a game-changer for biobanking and potentially for stem cell technology, providing a simple and noninvasive way to sample more individuals to better preserve genetic diversity.
The potential to transform primary cell lines into induced pluripotent stem cells opens up an additional array of possibilities, including the robustly demonstrated conversion of stem cells to sperm, eggs, and embryos in mice.
Read the full article here.
