Stem cells can be serious business, but sometimes stories come along that are just fun like a lady running a marathon dressed as a stem cell. How cool is this: “Louise Cato from Somerset is doing the run to raise money for the charity Anthony Nolan, after her dad had a bone marrow transplant over 30 years ago.”
That made my day.
Stem cells and metabolism
- α-Ketoglutarate promotes trophectoderm induction and maturation from naive human embryonic stem cells, Nat. Cell Bio.
- Glycolytic activity instructs germ layer proportions through regulation of Nodal and Wnt signaling, Cell Stem Cell.
- Distinct adipose progenitor cells emerging with age drive active adipogenesis, Science. I always heard that we don’t gain many fat cells, that the existing fat cells just get bigger if we gain weight. This new paper suggests a potential role for stem/progenitor cell production of new fat cells too.
More stem cell reads
- Ray Therapeutics Awarded $8M CIRM Grant to Advance RTx-015 Gene Therapy for Retinitis Pigmentosa, Business Wire. There’s hope here for more progress on retinitis pigmentosa. I feel like this disease should be treatable with regenerative medicine.
- Daily briefing: The biggest single piece of meat ever grown in the lab, Nature Briefing. Will people eat it?
- The establishment of nuclear organization in mouse embryos is orchestrated by multiple epigenetic pathways, Cell. Even just the distributions of heterochromatin and euchromatin in nuclei is cool to look at including with electron microscopy.
- This genetics firm didn’t resurrect the extinct dire wolf, but did achieve a breakthrough in hype, LA Times. Michael Hiltzik provides more info on this situation. As I’ve written before, what is the point of these de-extinction efforts? I don’t even see them making money if that’s their goal.