Over the weekends I try to catch up on more diverse reading and sometimes come up with a list of stuff I want to get to during this time, but I also put together weekend reads usually on Fridays as a kind of TGIF on The Niche for the wider audience here.
So here’s the weekend reads for this Friday the 13th including some wacky stuff at the end.
Anti-Aging efforts got some play in the media including this LA Times piece. Here’s the original new paper, entitled, “Senolytics improve physical function and increase lifespan in old age”. What do you think of it? What about the term “senolytics”? Seems a bit aspirational to me. I wonder what would happen if we could greatly reduce the number of senescent cells in humans? For those of us up there in years, maybe we’d fall apart. Isn’t there some old joke about removing the rust from an old car makes it fall apart as that was the only thing holding it together?
CRISPR turns cancer against itself? Here’s a SciAm piece by Sharon Begley on the news. As a cancer & CRISPR researcher and cancer survivor, I’m interested in this kind of news, but this seems to have a long road ahead potentially.
CRISPR gene drive doesn’t work so well in mice, reports Ewen Callaway regarding a bioRxiv preprint from work by UCSD’s Kimberly Cooper. I wonder if this is good news or bad? Gene drives are really powerful and dangerous tools that could do a lot of harm in nature or in humans, but have theoretical potential for good too. In this work apparently the gene drive also only worked in female mice.
And CRISPR gene editing in sperm? Is that possible? Perhaps. Here’s a media piece on this development by and
Let’s hear it for the podocytes. Here’s a report of a methods paper where you can make lots of these cool cells.
Some stem cell articles
- CRISPR stem cells. Renewed buzz on using CRISPR to make IPS cells non-genetically (my review of what seems to be the same paper just getting buzzed again).
- In the middle. Prospective Isolation of Poised iPSC Intermediates Reveals Principles of Cellular Reprogramming
- Interesting new insights on Oct4. Oct4 regulates the embryonic axis and coordinates exit from pluripotency and germ layer specification in the mouse embryo (see image of Figure 5C from Development paper above).
More wacky kind of stuff
Molecular ‘barcodes’ reveal lost whale hunts (the science isn’t wacky, but I thought the title of this was unusual).
World’s most cloned dog ‘Miracle Milly’ has been copied 49 times Well, I feel like there’s some pun one could make here. Any ideas? Hot dog?
and finally…
This from Dan Vergano over at BuzzFeed Science: An 11-Year-Old Got Most Of Her Genes From Her Dad, And Almost None From Her Mom and here’s the research pub.