Mouse experiments show how sugar molecules can be used to track stem cells

A Johns Hopkins Medicine scientist who spent 30 years figuring out how to put chemical labels into cells to track their movement in living tissues has found that certain self-renewing stem cells have built-in tracers—made out of sugars—that can do the job without added chemical "labels" when injected into mouse brains. The finding, made with stem cells widely engineered into experimental therapies for multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, was a welcome surprise, the investigators say.