The Boston researchers at the Sui Huang of Harvard Medical School finds that the adult stem cell in Bone Marrow can develop along one of the two paths, either the red or white blood cell lineages. Scientists have wondered why some bone marrow cells follow one path while other, seemingly identical cells go down the other. Also the study shows that these Bone Marrow stem cell have a blurry range of cells.

The study was published in the Nature. The researchers of the study isolated three subgroups of mouse Bone Marrow stem cells according to where the cells fell within the bell curve, the two edges or the middle. Also they find that after separation, each subgroup remained for a few days in its region of the bell curve. The cells in each group took more than nine days to diversify and fill the full range of the bell curve. It indicates that this variation was due to more than just noise in gene activity. If the bell curve was simply because of noise, this diversification would have only taken hours.

In the study,researchers also found that nearly 3,000 observed genes did not vary in activity independently of each other. Instead, the genes varied in a coordinated way as the cells wandered among the range of possible traits.

Source: Science News