Sir
Your News Feature 'The hard copy'1 describes the difficulties some researchers have encountered in reproducing several ground-breaking, high-profile publications in the stem-cell field. Although your News Feature accurately summarizes our principal findings2, the failure of a single group to reproduce our work could lead readers to believe this work has not been reproduced.
At least three independent groups have replicated the primary tenet of our paper, that neural tissue can transdifferentiate into haematopoietic cell types. Indeed, our results have been extended by showing that both human neural stem cells3,4 and rodent olfactory stem cells5 retain this capability. Transplantation into secondary recipients demonstrates that human neural stem-cell transdifferentiation can occur in a large animal model with long-term engraftment, similar to the finding in mice that we initially reported in our paper.
References
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Bjornson, C. R., Rietze, R. L., Reynolds, B. A., Magli, M. C. & Vescovi, A. L. Science 283, 534–537 (1999).
Almeida-Porada, G. et al. Brit. J. Haematol. 130, 276–283 (2005).
Shih, C. C. et al. Blood 98, 2412–2422 (2001).
Murrell, W. et al. Dev. Dyn. 233, 496–515 (2005).
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Vescovi, A., Reynolds, B., Rietze, R. et al. Ground-breaking stem-cell work has been reproduced. Nature 447, 259 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/447259d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/447259d
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