Use of the human cells could lead to methods for regenerating the tissues lost in many kinds of disease, but is ethically problematic because it requires the destruction of some human embryos left over from in vitro fertility treatments.
But it also could lead to methods for controlling elephant ovulation or timing artificial insemination.
Tasmanian devils are prone to a variety of tumors, and the results might lead to methods for quickly distinguishing animals with DFTD, says Murchison.
Tracking more subtle temblors, therefore, might someday lead to methods to locate regions of heavy seismic strain that could result in larger earthquakes, the scientists say.
The finding, reported next month in Physical Review Letters, could provide an early warning system and might eventually lead to methods for preventing seizures.
Figuring out exactly what these two brain regions are doing in hibernating animals and how they're regulated could lead to methods of inducing it in humans.
However, these approaches have led to methods lacking sufficient predictive power.
The ability to differentiate between specific types of bacteria could lead to methods for targeting bacterial species selectively.
Variations on this principle lead to methods that predict deleterious mutations by evaluating changes in evolutionarily conserved PFAM motifs [ 8].
