Does time seem somewhat warped to anyone else in 2020 even without having had COVID, which could alter brain function? It just seems like with everything going on that time simultaneously both drags and zooms by this year. One sort of reassuring element is that papers keep on being published so we can enjoy cool new science.
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Here are some pubs and media pieces that caught my eye in the past week.
Lab-grown meat
UC Davis Establishes Research, Training in Cultivated Meat. It’s great to see my colleagues pushing forward in this area. You might enjoy some past posts on lab-grown meat here.
Another RMAT
Medeor Therapeutics’ Transplant Immune Tolerance Therapy Receives Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation from FDA. You can see my full list of RMATs in the public domain here.
Pubs
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Deconstructing Stepwise Fate Conversion of Human Fibroblasts to Neurons by MicroRNAs, Cell Stem Cell. This is a direct reprogramming pub from a team led by Andrew Yoo and Samantha A. Morris. It gets at some interesting mechanisms.
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Context-Dependent Requirement of Euchromatic Histone Methyltransferase Activity during Reprogramming to Pluripotency, a nice one from Stem Cell Reports.
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Recapitulating macro-scale tissue self-organization through organoid bioprinting from Nature Materials. If someone would graph the number of pubs on organoids over the last 5 years it would probably have quite a sharp slope up.
- Dental cell type atlas reveals stem and differentiated cell types in mouse and human teeth, Nature Communications
- Acquired genetic changes in human pluripotent stem cells: origins and consequences in Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology from Peter Andrews and company. The number and character of mutations in human pluripotent stem cells has been a hot topic for at least a decade.
- Two papers in Science on the brain function of the crow or corvid family. They are smart! A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird and A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain. I’ve never done crow or corvid research, but just while birding and walking the dog, I’ve watched these birds at times and there’s just something extraordinary about their behavior. There are also some striking videos of birds from the crow family completing multi-step puzzles.
Blast from the past
My advice for new PI’s a decade ago when I was still relatively new (4 years into) being a professor: Advice for new PIs part I: start before you start. Above you can see a picture of my lab 14+ years ago when it wasn’t “worn in” as it now.