How to Find Adult Stem Cells

Stem cells make up only a tiny part of adult bodies (about one hundredth of one percent, or one cell in ten thousand). Finding them, and separating them from the rest of the tissue, is an important problem for scientists.

One way to find stem cells is to take a collection of cells and try to remove the ones that aren’t stem cells. Different types of “differentiated” cells can be identified, and then removed from the collection, using tools that scientists have developed over several years. Other methods rely on increasing the number of stem cells, without increasing the number of differentiated cells, or on sorting out the stem cells by using their size, weight, density or other physical characteristic.