Taking the Pee

Although we usually just flush it down the toilet, your urine could be a handy source of useful stem cells. Human urine stem cells can be purified away from the rest of the waste in wee and grown in the lab. By giving them certain molecules to settle on, they can be persuaded to take on all kinds of fates, including becoming bone, cartilage or even fat cells. These four panels follow these stem cells growing over five days on a special biological scaffold that encourages them to knit together to make bone. The resulting material can even be used to repair broken bones in rats. Although there are only a few stem cells in each beaker of urine, they can turn into millions in just a few weeks, providing a cheap source of cells to repair damaged bones – something to ponder next time you spend a penny, perhaps?

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Junjie Guan and colleagues
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, China
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS One, May 2015