Friday, February 1, 2013

Terahertz radiation affects stem cells?

Alexandrov et al. in Nature Scientific Reports show how terahertz radiation can affect mesenchymal stem cells and change the expression of genes:
Our microarray survey and RT-PCR experiments demonstrate that prolonged broadband THz irradiation drives mMSCs toward differentiation, while 2-hour irradiation (regardless of THz sources) affects genes transcriptionally active in pluripotent stem cells. 
Besides being a very weird (but cool) observation, I imagine that this would lead to the ability to specifically change gene activities using radio frequency devices in some cases and avoid pharmaceuticals.  That would be very, very cool indeed.