Bioengineering Organs

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avalina
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2020 4:29 pm
Occupation: Parent

Bioengineering Organs

Post by avalina »

Hi, I am doing a project relating to "Creating a Kidney: How Stem Cells Might Be Used to Bioengineer a Vital Organ". In the Make It Your Own section it said that there are many other organs that can be bioengineered. I am planning to make this project about lungs, but I am having a hard time finding out what cell types I am doing the research on. For example, the kidney has a main filtering system called the nephrons and the nephrons have two main parts to it that can be regenerated using stem cells.

The lungs have over 40 different cell types such as the epithelial cells: alveolar epithelial cells, basal cells, ciliated cells, etc. Would I have to do research on all of the 40 cells or only the important ones? If it is the important ones then which ones are the most important?

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Hi, I am doing a project related to "Creating a Kidney: How Stem Cells Might Be Used to Bioengineer a Vital Organ" except I am doing it on bioengineering lungs. I am wondering how I could find research papers that would explain the different soluble factors used to differentiate lung cells, like how it is shown in table 1 of the procedures. I have tried using the websites suggested but I do not understand how to specifically look for these soluble factors.

Thank you so much if you are willing to suggest websites/articles!



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koneill18
Expert
Posts: 188
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2020 8:22 am
Occupation: Other Adult

Re: Bioengineering Organs

Post by koneill18 »

Hello!

I wouldn't say it's necessary to research all 40 cell types in the lungs. I think it's sufficient to just choose a few that are most interesting to you. In this project, they focused on the nephrons since they're the main functional unit of the kidney. The alveoli are the main functional unit of the lungs, so maybe you just want to research the cells that make up the alveoli. Or you can always just search "lung bioengineering" and see which cell types are the most commonly used. It's totally up to you!

Once you decide on a few cell types to research, you can start looking for research papers that explain how to differentiate stem cells into those cell types. Google Scholar and Pubmed are the two websites I would recommend checking first. You can use the name of the cell type, "bioengineering", "differentiation", and "stem cell" as key words to help you find papers. To find out which soluble factors they used, you can go to the Materials and Methods section of the paper and read the section that explains how they cultured the cells. That's where it should tell you which soluble factors they used. The abstract of the paper might also tell you what they added to their stem cell cultures to make the cells differentiate. If you find any papers that you can't access, you can let us know and we might be able to get them for you.

I hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask any other questions that you have!
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