Gold Champion Cells

A line of bone marrow stem cells from Singapore has won the first ever World Cell Race, held at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology last week, reports Ivan Semeniuk at the Nature News blog. The race's organizers were happy with the turnout — 50 labs participated, and 70 cell lines were recorded. The gold medal champion cells "whizzed across a petri dish at the breakneck speed of 5.2 microns per minute — or 0.000000312 kilometers per hour," Semeniuk says. During the awards ceremony, the organizers gave the "tortoise award" to a line of modified mouse embryonic fibroblasts from the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey at Stratford, for moving most persistently and without changing direction, Semeniuk adds. But it's not all fun and games — the serious objective behind the competition was to examine how different cells move, and compare them with one another.