Weekly reads: badgers, organoids, The Onion, & more

It’s been a little quiet here on The Niche for the past week as I was off in Yellowstone National Park, but I’m back with this week’s recommended weekly reads including a section on organoids.

First, I want to share a nature pic from the trip. A highlight was encountering a badger in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. I didn’t know much about badgers until we saw one hunting prairie dogs on a hike. I just knew that they were kind of tough white, black, and grey animals.

Being just 20 yards from one made me realize they are relentless hunters and diggers. I wouldn’t want to be a prairie dog there.

There’s part of me that wishes I could have been a field biologist.

However, you don’t see many stem cells wandering hills or forests to study. Still, I bet there’d be something to learn from studying the stem cells of badgers or even making badger organoids. I just wouldn’t want to be the one who had to somehow get cells from a wild badger. I only found one paper on badgers that mentions stem cells on PubMed and it wasn’t what I expected.

On to our weekly reads.

Recommended pubs on organoids

• Organoid modeling of Zika and herpes simplex virus 1 infections reveals virus-specific responses leading to microcephaly, Cell Stem Cell. I highly recommend this pub as it is interesting on several levels. While my own research interests on microcephaly are more centered on genetics, I wonder about possible overlapping mechanisms.
• Patient-derived organoids model cervical tissue dynamics and viral oncogenesis in cervical cancer, Cell Stem Cell
• Patients’ perspectives on the derivation and use of organoids, Stem Cell Reports
• Next-generation cancer organoids, Nat Materials

More recommended reads including humor

• Chronic infection drives Dnmt3a-loss-of-function clonal hematopoiesis via IFNγ signaling, Cell Stem Cell
• Patients’ perspectives on the derivation and use of organoids, Nat Comm. 
• Hsf1 promotes hematopoietic stem cell fitness and proteostasis in response to ex vivo culture stress and aging, Cell Stem Cell
• Some good humor from The Onion: Scientist Really Thought Job Would Be Less Grant Writing And More Glow-In-The-Dark Lizard Making. I can’t say I ever imagined earlier in my career that I’d be making mutant lizards, but there is more grant writing than I had hoped.