• Question: what is proliferation?

    Asked by rosiejessica to Tomasz, Matt, Dave, Aoife, Anzy on 15 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Proliferation is how cells increase in number, starting from one cell which divides into two, and so on. For a lot of experiments we have to get our cells to proliferate lots because the numbers we start with are not enough, for example in teeth there are maybe 100 stem cells, but I need about 5-10 million cells to do an experiment.

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Just to add to Matt’s anwer:

      Stem cells proliferate quite quickly in comparison to other cell-types. In my lab, we have seen that we can affect the speed at which embryonic stem cells proliferate by growing them in different amounts of oxygen. The cells grown with more oxygen seem to proliferate slower than those grown with less oxygen, which might be surprising.

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