Let's make liver

Detoxification is what livers do best, and regenerating after toxic insults is what livers do second best. All that proliferative capacity suggests that liver stem cells might be a very different and more prevalent beast than stem cells from other organs. But, on page 173, Suzuki et al. report that the fetal mouse liver, just like the adult bone marrow, has as its founder a relatively rare and undifferentiated cell type.

Suzuki et al. have attempted to isolate liver stem cells before, but their isolation strategy fell short of allowing clonal analysis. Now they add one additional selection marker (cMet, the receptor for hepatocyte growth factor) and use cell sorting to achieve a 560-fold enrichment for hepatic colony-forming units in culture (H-CFU-Cs). These single cells do not express markers for either hepatocytes or...