Federally-funded researchers who have been wringing their hands over the inaccessibility of certain human embryonic stem cell lines were given cause to applaud with those same hands late yesterday.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) added 13 newcomers to its registry of federally-fundable stem cell lines — including two key, widely-used stem cell lines, H9 and H7, that were federally funded during the administration of George W. Bush but which entered a funding limbo last July, when strict new guidelines for federal funding under President Barack Obama were put in place.

The WiCell Research Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, which owns H9 and H7, also won NIH approval yesterday for two other popular Bush-era lines, H13 and H14. Officials at WiCell had spent months gathering the documentation needed to win the four lines’ re-approval, a task complicated by their provenance in Israel. “Many researchers have invested years studying these specific cell lines, so without this approval, millions of dollars of time-consuming research could have been set back for years, or even ended,” Erik Forsberg, the executive director, said in a press release.

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NIH director Francis Collins wasn’t shy, either, about touting the new approvals, (which another NIH official said “went like lightning.”)

“You will notice in this morning’s Washington Post that we have now approved another set of stem cell lines, bringing the total to 64 that are available for use by federally funded researchers,” Collins told a House appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday morning.

You can check out the relative importance of H7, H9, H13 and H14 to the existing literature by going to the International Stem Cell Registry run by the University of Massachusetts here and then clicking at the top of the right-hand column on “number of publications” for a rank ordering. Collins told the Washington Post that the new additions mean that, all told, the 64 lines now approved for federal funding account for 89% of the scientific literature published from 1999 to 2008.

Nine new lines from the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University and Stanford University also got the go-ahead from NIH yesterday.