The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that 13 new embryonic stem cell lines are now eligible for federal funding. That means that scientists with NIH grants can study embryonic stem cells derived using newer, more refined methods generally considered to be superior to the older ones. Ninety-six additional lines are also now under review.

"Those were early days in the science of stem cell research, and much has been learned since then," said NIH director Francis Collins in a press conference on Wednesday, referring to the stem cell lines, created before 2001, that had previously been eligible for federal funding. "In the last eight years, hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines have been derived using non-federal funds, many of them carrying more favorable characteristics."

As I wrote in a previous story:

Using only the old lines is like "being required to use Microsoft Word 1998," says Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA.

The earlier lines were derived using animal products, making them largely unfit for therapeutic use. "There are hundreds of embryonic stem-cell lines out there that have been made under the best conditions, and some of them are patient ready," says John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. "They have greater utility, performance, and safety than [the Bush-approved] lines."

The announcement follows President Obama's executive order made last March, enabling government support for embryonic stem cell research. That order overturned a previous one by President Bush in 2001, limiting federally-funded research to a set of existing cell lines. The 2001 decree forced scientists who wanted to create and use new stem cell lines, derived from leftover IVF embryos, to garner private funding.

Eleven of the 13 new lines were generated in George Daley's lab at Children's Hospital, in Boston, which used private funding to make them. According to the New York Times, "Dr. Daley said that private financing had been drying up and that he was eager to start research on the now-approved cell lines with the help of his federal grant money." Researchers still cannot derive new lines using federal funds--creating new lines requires the destruction of an embryo.

Students from Cambridge University, in England, engineered bacteria to produce pigments in all colors of the rainbow (shown above) as part of the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition at MIT. Credit: Mike Davies

Bioengineering students from around the world converged on MIT this weekend in what has become an annual ritual in synthetic biology--iGEM, the international genetically engineered machines competition. Among the finalists this year were "GluColi", a new generation of glue made by bacteria, a biological version of an LCD screen made of yeast, and a multicolored menagerie of bacteria that might ultimately become part of a biological system designed to change color in response to toxins or other target compounds, providing an easy-to-read warning system.

By combining snippets of DNA, dubbed biological "parts", students build microbes designed to perform useful functions, such as producing medicines or detecting toxins. Each year "parts" built for the competition are entered into a biological library, so that next year's teams can use them to build even more sophisticated machines. As iGEM co-founder and MIT bioengineer Tom Knight explained in a previous piece, "The key idea here is to develop a library of composable parts which we think of in the same way as Lego blocks. These parts can be assembled into more-complex pieces, which in many cases are functional when inserted into living cells."

Entries into previous years have included yeast designed to produce beer with the health benefits of red wine, sweet-smelling E. coli, a commonly used research bacterium with a vile odor, and probiotic bacteria, like that found in yogurt, designed to fight cavities, produce vitamins, and treat lactose intolerance.

To make multicolored microbes, students from Cambridge University, in England, mined bacterial genomes for pigment-producing genes. They then engineered those genes into the harmless strain of E. coli used in genetic research. Carotinoid enzymes co-opted from Pantoea ananatis, a bacterium that can rot onions, generated red and orange pigments. A gene for melanin, an enzyme from the soil bacterium Rhizobium etli, produces brown. Chromobacterium violacein, a soil and water dwelling microbe offered genes capable of producing shades of violet, green and blue.