The exciting and sometimes downright crazy giant stem cell ecosystem of legit research and unproven stem cell clinics could use a dose of good news now and then. In today post, I highlight some upbeat news and some interesting recent pubs.
Enjoy!
From a team led by Hina Chaudhry, MD, Director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, a new PNAS pub, “Multipotent fetal-derived Cdx2 cells from placenta regenerate the heart.” Congrats to first author Sangeetha Vadakke-MadathilThis is a mouse study, but it has some translational potential for human patients. It also includes cool videos (you can see a screenshot of one at right.)
I need to read the paper before I can say how fully convinced I am of the central idea, but it’s on my reading list. For instance, I saw that in one figure they say they ruled out cell fusion in at least one context, but fusion is always a potential complicating factor with stem cell transplantation studies. For instance, in a hESC and hIPSC transplantation study my lab did with our colleague Veronica Martinez-Cerdeno, we found extension fusion of these stem cells with mouse brain cells. Again I need to dig into the pub in the coming week or two. Looks cool.
Single-cell proteomics! Wow from Cell Stem Cell. Single-Cell Proteomics Reveal that Quantitative Changes in Co-expressed Lineage-Specific Transcription Factors Determine Cell Fate.
Highly Efficient and Marker-free Genome Editing of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells by CRISPR-Cas9 RNP and AAV6 Donor-Mediated Homologous Recombination. Another Cell Stem Cell piece, this one from a Matthew Porteus-led team.
Pluripotency or differentiation? That is the question. Here’s the original Molecular Cell paper from a team led by Micha Drukker, which has some insights into paraspeckles. You can learn more about paraspeckles here. In part, this paper (Modic, et al.), shows that NEAT1_2 Recruits TDP-43 into Paraspeckles. Congrats to first author Miha Modic.
Stem cell differences could explain why women are more likely to develop adrenal cancer.
In movie S5 “demonstrating lack of spontaneous beating in eGFP- (tdTomato+) cells on CM feeders” it looks to me like it ‘beats’ just like the GFP test cells. Maybe I’m seeing things?
Need to read through the whole article and look at methods as well, certainly exciting but I’ll want to see more.