Fetal Mice Give Stem Cells to Repair Mothers' Hearts

Stem cells... is there anything they CAN'T do?

A study has found that fetuses in pregnant mice generate stem cells to help their mothers after they've suffered heart attacks. To find out how this happened, scientists at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine took plain ol' lab mice and got them impregnated by male mice injected with green fluorescent protein, which makes their cells glow green when exposed to blue light. Once the females were 12 days into their pregnancy – about two-thirds of the term – the team induced heart attacks. They later observed that the mothers' hearts had been flooded by fluorescent green stem cells that could only have come from the fetuses. The team concluded that this is proof that fetuses – in mice, at least - respond to ailments in their mothers and help to rectify the injury by sending stem cells to help repair the muscle. As to how this impacts humans, Valerie Ross of Discovery Magazine does point out research showing that recently pregnant mothers recover faster from heart failure than other patients with the same ailment. Obviously, we now need to pump human mothers full of fluorescent proteins to see if this phenomenon carries across to our species.