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Bioscientists announced Wednesday that they have turned the skin cells of mice into brain cells in less than a week.

"We actively and directly induced one cell type to become a completely different cell type," said Marius Wernig, an assistant professor of pathology at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California.

"These are fully functional neurons. They can do all the principal things that neurons in the brain do," Wernig told the AFP news agency

The exploit "is a huge leap forward," added Irving Weissman of the university's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

There has been lots of funding pushed into stem-cell research, driven by hopes that immature cells can be prompted into becoming specific adult cells for the heart, brain and so on.

According to AFP, one day cells could be coaxed into becoming replacement material for tissue damaged by an accident, or by diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

It was thought that only pluripotent stem cells could give rise to all types of cells in the body, until now.

Embryonic stem cells have triggered controversy, with objections from the Roman Catholic Church, which says that an embryo is a human life.

In 2007, "induced" pluripotent stem cells were created to help ease moral objections.

These are adult skin cells that are reprogrammed with a basket of genes and bath of proteins back to their pluripotent state, and then prompted into developing into a new cell type.

This new research skips this intermediary stage by converting mature cells, taken from the skin of mice tails, into neurons in a lab dish all in a single step.

Thomas Vierbuchen, who led the study, used three genes involved in reprogramming and neutral function. 

It took less than a week for the transformation, after which the cells were injected into living mice.  The former skin cells looked like brain cells and expressed neural proteins.

According to the paper, another plus was the success rate in transforming the skin cells into neurons.

The study, which was published online by the British Journal Nature, said that at 20 percent, it was up to 10 times more efficient than conventional pluripotent stem cell techniques.

The next step of the research will be to duplicate the same results on human cells.