[6] The researchers also claimed that treatment with bacterial toxins or physical stress were conducive to the acquisition of pluripotent markers.
[1] STAP cells injected into mouse embryos grew into a variety of tissues and organs found throughout the body.
[9] Additionally, these mice produced healthy offspring, thereby demonstrating germline transmission which is "a strict criterion for pluripotency as well as genetic and epigenetic normality.
[1] The manuscript describing the work was rejected multiple times before its eventual publication as an article (together with a shorter jointly-written "letter") within the journal Nature.
The allegations questioned the use of seemingly duplicated images in the papers, and reported failure to reproduce her results in other prominent stem-cell laboratories.
[15] On March 11, Teruhiko Wakayama, one of Obokata's coauthors, urged all the researchers involved to withdraw the articles, citing many "questionable points".
On August 5, 2014, Obokata's supervisor and co-author of the original paper, Yoshiki Sasai, was discovered dead by apparent suicide by hanging in a building at the RIKEN facility in Kobe, Japan.
[25][26] If the findings had proven to be valid, stimulus-triggered pluripotency cells could have been generated more easily and efficiently than by existing iPS techniques.
[1] Adapted to human tissue, the technique could have led to cheap and simple procedures to create patient-specific stem cells.
[9] Shinya Yamanaka, a pioneer of iPS research, called the findings "important to understand nuclear reprogramming ... [and] a new approach to generate iPS-like cells".
[1] The idea that STAP cells can form placental tissue meant they could have made cloning considerably easier by bypassing the need for a donor egg and in vitro cultivation.