This was a busy week for me working on a grant due Friday and a bunch of other stuff including happily analyzing a bunch of data, but there were tons of interesting papers recently including on pluripotency.
California stem cell clinic court case on in the background
Along the way this week I was occasionally trying to listen in on the federal district court trial here in California. It is US vs. California Stem Cell Treatment Center, Cell Surgical Network, et al. I myself briefly testified in this trial last week.
I’m hoping to write up the experience of testifying and watching the trial in the next week or so if I have time.
This is a crucial case.
It in part tests the FDA’s authority to regulate stem cells as drugs, mainly related to their use by stem cell clinics. A Florida stem cell clinic case that in my view shares some similarities with the California one (e.g. with ‘fat stem cell’-related products at the heart of it) was decided in 2019 in the FDA’s favor. It is pending appeal.
On to the recommended stem cell paper reading.
- PHC1 maintains pluripotency by organizing genome-wide chromatin interactions of the Nanog locus, Nature Communications. See Fig. 1e above. This is a super interesting paper. It seems like PRC2 gets so much attention relative to PRC1. 3-D chromatin mechanisms are rightly getting so much attention these days as well.
- A stem cell population at the anorectal junction maintains homeostasis and participates in tissue regeneration, Nature Communications
- Activation of estrogen receptor beta signaling reduces stemness of glioma stem cells, Stem Cells
- Agarose microgel culture delineates lumenogenesis in naive and primed human pluripotent stem cells, Stem Cell Reports. The methods in this paper are striking and there’s a cool video.
- Targeting SUMOylation dependency in human cancer stem cells through a unique SAE2 motif revealed by chemical genomics, Cell Chemical
- Persistent NF-κB activation in muscle stem cells induces proliferation-independent telomere shortening, Cell Reports
Skin stem cells
- Single-keratinocyte transcriptomic analyses identify different clonal types and proliferative potential mediated by FOXM1 in human epidermal stem cells, Nature Communications
- Skin-resident immune cells actively coordinate their distribution with epidermal cells during homeostasis, Nature Cell Biology