Madakaripura "The Wonderful Indonesian Waterfall I've seen"

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Hey guys, it was a long time since my last post regarding my workplace. I want to tell you about our adventure (me with my life mate :D) in madakaripura waterfall. I and Ines were going to madakaripura waterfall which situated at Probolinggo, near Mt Bromo. We didn't plan to go there before, but we had planned visiting tea garden at lawang Malang. Suddenly, when we were still on the road, she wanted to go to madakaripura waterfall. It was 2,5 hours from Sidoarjo to Madakaripura. There was a beautiful mountain scenery around there. We continued our trip from parking area to water fall site by passing several rivers and walking on the barren road. Sometimes We walked on the big stone across the river. Yeahhh, It was very exciting for us !!!, we hadn't met like this kind of adventure before :D :D :D. Needless to say, we had walked around 30 minutes, it might be 1.5 km far. Here some pictures that we took in Madakaripura 

My workplace

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Examining  flourescence microscope specimen of mesenchymal stem cell in retina repair (dr Titik's research)

Yeeah :D,.. It was 6 month since i started working as a laboratory technician in Rumah Sakit Tropik Infeksi Universitas Airlangga (Research Hospital for Tropical Infectious Disease, Airlangga University). I have been enjoying my current adventure in research environment, giving assistance to student and doing some analytical tasks i.e. ELISA, PCR, and microscopy imaging. My Director, Prof. Boerhan Hidayat, always encourages us to develop research theme and submit research proposal for grant fundraising. Finnaly, I am very surprised that I have been granted 41.6 millions rupiah for studying the role of microRNA  from Indonesian Torray Science Foundation. This is my workplace, but it is not a workplace i think, It is my pleasure world, because i could develop my scientific potential to be the next stem cell biologist. It is my starting point to succes...:D :D :D :D:D

My Greetings

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Hi guys, I am feeling grateful to make this blog today, and I am happy if you could join and share anything related with science in this webpage. I am happy to know you all and connect with you wherever you are. I wish this blog could connect us and share something helpfull. If you see the picture above, it was our moment when i with my friends won the national science olympiad. from the left (Mr Yusuf ), (Mr Arif Wibowo), (Mr Anonim, hehehee :D), (Widi Eko), (Me), (Director of Student Achievements and Stuff), (Ivon), (Cicik).

Stem Cell Biology

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image taken from http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/stem-cells.jpg

I feel gratefully to post one of the current hot topic in science,  "Stem Cells".  What is it ? is there anyone know about it before ? I wish you have known about it before, and here i would like to share some of the hot topic about the stem cells today, let's check it up.

Stem cells have outstandingly potential to develop into many differentiated type of cells in the body during early live and growth. Moreover, Stem cells serve as a "toolkit" for repairing and tissue regeneration during injury or normal physiological process, example  cell loss in the intestine. When the stem cells divide, they produce progeny with similar properties that act as stem cells and more specialized cells. Either progeny that could divide and differentiated again (progenitor cells) or terminally differentiated cells (e.g neurons, muscle cells, blood cells).

Two properties make stem cells distinguished from other cell types. Stem cells have ability to self renew as unspecialized cells by self renewing themselves through cell division. They produce progeny that has properties as stem cells. Stem cells can be induced to become another type of cells with specialized function through culturing in the medium by the presence of specific growth factor. It was shown that many organs like bone marrow, gut epithelial, and skin have stem cells that provide unlimited cells for replenish dislodge or injured old cells. Without stem cells, our body can not produce blood cells, our skins are going to collapse, our gut are going to wreckage. Therefore it will be worst if the stem cells in our body disappear.

Recently, scientists have made incredibly progress unraveling basic stem cells biology and its application. There are three kinds of stem cells. Stem cells which derived from animal or human embryo is called embryonic stem cells. It has ability to generate almost any type of cells that composed our bodies. All neurons, blood cells, and skin cells could be generated by culturing ES cells in specific culture conditions, frequently by adding tissue-specific growth factors in culture medium. Another type of stem cells are addult stem cells. This type of stem cells are found in adult tissue. Adult stem cells could generate several cells, but its potency lower than ES cells. The third stem cells produced by "forced" expression of 4 key transcriptional factors (Oct3/4, Klf4, c-Myc, Nanog) by transducing adult somatic cells with retroviral or lentiviral carrying them. This experiment was shown by Sinya Yamanaka who won Noble Prize for his recognized accomplishment on this.

      Human embryonic stem cells 

(image was taken from http://www.bioequip.cn/ewebeditor/200500/201110269286895.jpg)

Generation induced Pluripotent Stem Cells and blastocyst complementation assay for assaying pluripotency of generated iPSC 

(The picture was taken from http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/turning-somatic-cells-into-pluripotent-stem-cells-14431451)

On the regard of their regenerative potential, stem cells could be used to threat many regenerative diseases and injuries. Stem cells have promising application to threat diabetes, kidney failure, neurodegenerative disease. Besides, stem cells always give us better understanding to learn diseases progression especially malignancies. It was though that malignancies are developed from the abnormal tissues stem cells regulation. By studying stem cells behavior in normal and diseased condition, it would be better understanding for us to develop potential healing strategies. Stem cell biology is a new expanding field, it has been growing up several decades. 

Although we have been made many significant progress in stem cells, we still need to uncover many mystery in basic stem cells before translating it to become valuable therapy candidate. Therefore I am very challenged to study stem cells.   

References

1. Stem Cell Biology Edited By Daniel R Marshak, Richard L Gardner, David Gottlieb. Cold Spring Harbor Press.

2. Takahashi, K., Yamanaka, S., 2006., Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Mouse Embryonic and Adult Fibroblast Cultures by Defined Factors., Cell Stem Cell., Volume 126, Issue 4, p663–676

3. http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/pages/basics1.aspx