Process Discovered That Converts Blood Vessels to Blood Stem Cells During Early Development

Scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Rome say they found a switch that instructs blood vessel cells to become blood stem cells during embryonic development. The team discovered that two sets of specific factors in the cells work against each other, and when the balance of these changes, the vascular tube cells convert to free blood cells. The study (“ Single-Cell Transcriptomics Reveals a New Dynamical Function