Split Decision

Two newspapers might give very different accounts of a single story. And two research papers might come to very different conclusions about a particular part of biology, depending on the experiments they ran. There were conflicting reports about whether a certain cellular signal, the Wnt/β-catenin pathway, tells stem cells to stay flexible (pluripotent) or start developing into specific cell types. A new study activated the pathway in stem cells and found they developed into two types: flexible ‘naive-like’ cells, and more specialised developed ones. They then tested the development of each type into neurons linked to Parkinson’s disease and found that the flexible group formed healthier neurons compared to those that were already partially developed (pictured, with neuronal markers in green, red, and blue showing poorly-formed neurons). These split cell fates could explain the previous conflicting findings, and might help researchers give lab-grown neurons the best possible start.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Kevin R. Yi and colleagues
• Minerva Biotechnologies, Waltham, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS ONE, June 2025