Phenol Red - Estrogen Mimic

Estrogen Mimic

Phenol red is a weak estrogen mimic, and in cell cultures can enhance the growth of cells that express the estrogen receptor.

An important breakthrough in biotechnology was reported in the scientific literature on May 5, 2005. Using phenol red as a differentiation factor, scientists at the University of Tennessee produced human oocytes (eggs) from cells scraped from the surface of adult ovaries. These cells on the outer ovarian surface are known as ovarian surface epithelial cells. Such cells had been taken from five women aged 39 to 52 and were cultured in the presence of phenol red, inducing oogenesis.

Previously, human eggs had only been produced in vitro from totipotent, blastomeric embryonic stem cells. One of the significant aspects of this experiment is that it demonstrated viable human egg cells can easily be produced from an adult cell that already has some degree of specialization. Furthermore, it lessens the implications associated with the fact that women are born with all of the egg cells they will ever have throughout their lives. While this breakthrough was not without controversy, it provides hope for infertile women wishing to undergo in vitro fertilization, and hints at the possibility of new options for post-menopausal women as well. It also suggests that the future of stem cell research may not have to rely as heavily on human embryos as a source of unspecialized, totipotent cells for research.