When people find out that I’m a stem cell researcher, a common question is whether there’s something they can take that is a stem cell activator.
I’ve written before about whether there are stem cell boosts that one can do to try to be healthier.
Sleep, stem cell activator and clonality
Mostly when I bring this up people think of supplements, cell treatments, drugs, or other things like that.
However, research to date suggests the most likely way to try to maintain a healthy stem cell state is through simpler things.
Exercise. Get enough sleep. Eat right.
Even for these things there aren’t super concrete data, but there are hints, especially for exercise. A new study supports the idea that sleep is indeed important too.
Sleep exerts lasting effects on hematopoietic stem cell function and diversity, JEM. One of the more interesting aspects of this paper is that sleep seems to preserve clonal diversity in blood stem cells. This was done in mice with some additional data from people.
I found another article this week on hematopoietic clonal expansion. Quality assurance of hematopoietic stem cells by macrophages determines stem cell clonality, Science. They found that macrophages can be stem cell activators leading to division or weeding out undesired stem cells by eating them.
Maybe sleep also impacts macrophage function including action on HSCs? Note that this study was done in zebrafish using some cool methods. See part of a figure above.
More recommended reads
- Single-cell multi-omics of human clonal hematopoiesis reveals that DNMT3A R882 mutations perturb early progenitor states through selective hypomethylation, Gen.
- AMC treats interstitial cystitis with stem cell therapy in ‘world’s 1st’ clinical trial,Korean Biomedical Review.The team used MSCs derived from hESCS. Here’s the report of the Phase I trial in Stem Cells Translational Medicine.
- Announcing the third annual Rising Black Scientists Awards, Cell Press.
- Stress-triggered hematopoietic stem cell proliferation relies on PrimPol-mediated repriming, Mol Cell.
- Passage number affects differentiation of sensory neurons from human induced pluripotent stem cells, Sci Reports.