Regenerative reads: pig fat, cancer, organoids, more

It’s usually a tossup as to whether my weekly reads skew more towards stem cells/regenerative medicine or cancer. Other times they are more enriched for genomics and epigenetics articles.

• Seeds of cancer in normal skin, Nature News & Views
• Engineering synthetic morphogen systems that can program multicellular patterning, Science.
• Pig fat can be used to grow jawbones for humans, Science Mag news piece. Pig fat stem cells can aid in jawbone growth. Here’s the original Science Translational Medicine research pub.
• Inherited myeloproliferative neoplasm risk affects haematopoietic stem cells, Nature
• “Sequencing the genomes of individual skin cells called melanocytes has revealed a rich landscape of DNA changes. These insights shed light on the origins of melanoma, an aggressive type of cancer.” The source Nature pub is The genomic landscapes of individual melanocytes from human skin
• SARS-CoV-2 infects the brain choroid plexus and disrupts the blood-CSF-barrier in human brain organoids, Cell Stem Cell. Great new pub from Madeline Lancaster’s lab.
• A Network of Macrophages Supports Mitochondrial Homeostasis in the Heart, Cell.
• The CIRM blog The Stem Cellar had a great, really comprehensive piece on the stem cell and regenerative medicine program here at UC Davis.

Blast from the past

Here were my stem cell predictions for 2011 made way back in 2010. Talk about stem cell history. It’s interesting how ES cell-focused this was. Here was one prediction that was so wrong and somehow still is 10 years later: A surprisingly large number of Republican leaders publicly support embryonic stem cell research.