Rat Skin Tissue
The digital image in the above section is a three-dimensional reconstruction of rat skin tissue stained with Alexa Fluor 488 (wheat germ agglutinin; highlighting lectins), Alexa Fluor 568 (phalloidin; labeling actin filaments), and DAPI (nuclei). For many years rodent skin cells have been used in a variety of studies. Recent advances have made them even more valuable to research, for example, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles used reprogrammed mouse skin cells to be pluripotent stem cells that differentiated into several types of functional cardiovascular and blood cells. This and other work suggests an alternative to the much more controversial embryonic stem cells.