As a researcher, is there ever enough time to get to everything that you want to read especially in newer areas like stem cells, organoids, and CRISPR, without even including non-scientific reads like Shakespeare or a new novel or something like that? Hopefully, putting together lists of recommended reads like today’s post is helpful. I wonder what Shakespeare would have thought about organoids?
Media including COVID-19 updates
- Interesting change at Nature, which will be diving more into political coverage. Here’s their editorial on this move.
- Mesenchymal stem cells alleviate LPS-induced acute lung injury by inhibiting the proinflammatory function of Ly6C+ CD8+ T cells, Cell Death & Disease. Seems relevant to the push to use MSCs for COVID-19.
- One of Trump’s COVID-19 treatments was developed using tissue that originally came from an abortion. He’s tried to ban this kind of research. There has been a great deal of discussion about the use of fetal cells in research on development of possible new COVID treatments. What do you think? Does it matter?
- New state law will finally allow UC Davis to sell wine made in classes by students. In time for helping us through the rest of 2020?
- RNA and siRNA delivery to the lungs, Nature Biotechnology
Pubs
- Generation of myostatin edited horse embryos using CRISPR/Cas9 technology and somatic cell nuclear transfer, Scientific Reports. While agricultural myostatin targeting seems all about changing up meat production, some folks are gung-ho about CRISPR’ing myostatin in humans to make “better” muscles. The so-called “double-muscled” pigs seem to offer one of many potential cautionary tales in this regard as the pumped up piglet were difficult for the sows to give birth to given their size.
- Cold‐induced chromatin compaction and nuclear retention of clock mRNAs resets the circadian rhythm, Embo J. See part of Fig. 1 above.
- Base-resolution methylomes of gliomas bearing histone H3.3 mutations reveal a G34 mutant-specific signature shared with bone tumors, Scientific Reports. You can learn more about my lab’s work on H3.3 mutations in glioma here in our recent pub (and my summary of it here) and on our lab homepage, chromatin.com.
- EZH2-dependent epigenetic modulation of histone H3 lysine-27 contributes to psoriasis by promoting keratinocyte proliferation, Cell Death & Disease.
- Phenotypic landscape of intestinal organoid regeneration, Nature. It’s exciting how they provide insights into tissue homeostasis versus regeneration. I also wonder about possible tie-ins to cancer. They appear to have used hundreds of thousands of organoids in this study.
- Tumor necrosis factor overcomes immune evasion in p53-mutant medulloblastoma. Nature Neuroscience.
Blasts from the past
Ten years ago I did a series of posts on neurological diseases, and while in each case there was some interesting developments, in hindsight I think my titles of the posts were too exuberant.