Mouse Skin Tissue - 63x
The digital image above is a three-dimensional reconstruction of thick sections of mouse skin tissue. For many years mouse skin cells have been used in a wide variety of studies and recent advances have made them even more valuable to scientific work. In 2008, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles reported that they used reprogrammed mouse skin cells to be pluripotent stem cells, which they then successfully differentiated into several types of functional cardiovascular and blood cells. This and other work with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) suggests that there may be viable alternatives to the much more controversial embryonic stem cells.