Researchers at the University of Helsinki, Finland, believe they have discovered stem cells that play a decisive role in new blood vessel growth. If researchers learn to isolate and efficiently produce these stem cells found in blood vessel walls, the cells offer new opportunities in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and many other diseases. The study is published in the PLOS Biology journal on 16 October 2012.
Skin Stem Cells: In Morphogenesis, Wound Repair and Cancer
Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D., Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor,
The Rockefeller University
March 2, 2012
Recommended Readings:
Blanpain, C., and E. Fuchs. 2009. Epidermal homeostasis: A balancing act of stem cells in the skin. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 10, (3): 207-217
Ezhkova, E., W. -H Lien, N. Stokes, H. A. Pasolli, J. M. Silva, and E. Fuchs. 2011. EZH1 and EZH2 cogovern histone H3K27 trimethylation and are essential for hair follicle homeostasis and wound repair. Genes and Development 25, (5): 485-498
Fuchs, E. 2007. Scratching the surface of skin development. Nature 445, (7130): 834-842
Guasch, G., M. Schober, H. A. Pasolli, E. B. Conn, L. Polak, and E. Fuchs. 2007. Loss of TGFβ signaling destabilizes homeostasis and promotes squamous cell carcinomas in stratified epithelia. Cancer Cell 12, (4): 313-327
Kobielak, A., and E. Fuchs. 2006. Links between α-catenin, NF-κB, and squamous cell carcinoma in skin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103, (7): 2322-2327
Williams, S. E., S. Beronja, H. A. Pasolli, and E. Fuchs. 2011. Asymmetric cell divisions promote notch-dependent epidermal differentiation. Nature 470, (7334): 353-358
Yi, R., and E. Fuchs. 2010. MicroRNA-mediated control in the skin. Cell death and differentiation 17, (2): 229-235
Functional Integration of Large ncRNAs in the Molecular
Circuitry Controlling Cell State
Mitchell Guttman
Graduate Fellow
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Monday, February 27, 2012
4 p.m, Caspary Auditorium. Refreshments 3:45 p.m.
Recommended Readings:
Yang, LG; Lin CR; Rosebfeld MG. 2011. A lincRNA switch for embryonic stem cell fate. Cell Research 21(12):1646-1648. DOI:10.1038/cr.2011.166
Guttman M; Donachey J; Carey BW; et al. 2011. lincRNAs act in the circuitry controlling pluripotency and differentiation. NATURE. 477(7364):295-U60. DOI:10.1038/nature10398
Loewer S; Cabili MN; Guttman M: et al. 2010. Large intergenic non-coding RNA-RoR modeulates reprogramming of human induced pluripotent stem cells. NATURE Genetics. 42(12):1113- DOI: 10.1038/ng.710
Huarte M; Guttman M; Feldser D; et al. 2010. A large intergenic noncoding RNA induced by p53 mediates global gene repression in thep53 response. Cell. 142(3):409-419. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2010.06.040
Guttman, M; Garber M; Levin JZ; et al. 2010. Ab initio reconstruction of cell type-specific transcriptomes in mouse reveals the conserved multi-exonic structure of lincRNAs. NATURE Biotechnology. 28(5):503-U166. DOI: 10.1038/nbt.1633
Khalil AM; Guttman M; Huarte M; et al. 2009. Many human large intergenic noncoding RNAs associate with Chromatin-modifying complexes and affect gene expression. PNAS. 106(28):11667-11672 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0904715106
Guttman M; Amit I; Garber M; et al. 2009. Chromatin signature reveals over a thousand highly conserved large no-coding RNAs in mammals. NATURE. 458(7235):223-227. DOI: 10.1038/nature07672
Researchers at National Jewish Health have identified cells and signaling molecules that trigger the repair of injured lungs. Stijn De Langhe, PhD, and his colleagues report October 10, 2011, online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, that destruction of lung tissue in mice induces smooth muscle cells surrounding the airways to secrete a protein known as fibroblast growth factor 10 (FGF10), which induces surviving epithelial cells in the airways to revert to a stem-cell state, proliferate, repair and repopulate the lining of the lungs.
The British government has given its approval for the creation of a £30 million stem cell therapy center, part of a £220 million program to turn British stem cell researchers’ discoveries into “a new multimillion-pound industry to help drive Britain’s recovery,” reports the Guardian‘s Rupert Neate. The stem cell center, which is slated to open in April 2012, will take advantage of the UK’s leadership in stem cell research, Neate says. The researchers will work to manufacture therapies for everything from Parkinson’s disease to prostate cancer. A third of the money will come from the British government, another third from the European Union, and the rest from companies like Pfizer and AstraZeneca, which are contracting to use part of the site where the center will be located. “It will have a test manufacturing facility to help labs convert a couple of grams of potentially life-saving cells into kilos of the stuff that can be sold commercially,” David Bott, director of innovation at the Technology Strategy Board, tells Neate.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have launched an open-access database for collecting and analyzing quantitative information about pluripotent stem cells, including data on mRNA, protein, and post-translational modifications.
Named the Stem Cell -Omics Repository, the resource was launched this week to coincide with a study published in Nature Methods comparing the proteomes and phosphoproteomes of human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells.
In addition to providing this protein-level comparison, the paper lays out a proteomic workflow using a relatively large number of samples and biological replicates to draw out subtle but potentially important differences between similar cell types, said study leader Joshua Coon, UW-Madison assistant professor
For the stem-cell work the researchers “combined high accuracy mass spectrometry and isobaric tagging on a large scale” in a way that let them compare proteins and phosphorylation sites across four ESC lines and four iPSC lines in biological triplicate. This enabled them to identify differences between the lines that would otherwise have gone undetected.
George Church is thinking a lot about using regeneration as the key to treatments and keeping people healthy. Induced pluripotent stem cells “is where I’m putting almost all of my chips these days, because it combines many of my interests — genomics, sequencing, epigenetics, synthetic biology, stem cells,” Church adds. While much of the work so far has been done in rodents, he says that it’ll be years, not decades, until it is tested in people. “The only way people are going to get this is through some brave soul,” Church says. “It will start with a sick person, and they will end up getting well, possibly more well than before they got sick.” Read more in MIT’S Technology Review‘s Experimental Man.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, using a combination of techiques, conducted a rigorous analysis of ESC’s and iPSC’s revealing significant and functionally related differences. Their research also resulted in the establishment of a new online resource named SCOR for storing and searching data on pluripotency. Read more in NATURE METHODS.
The lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama administration’s policy on embryonic stem cell research has now been dismissed — by the same federal judge who ruled last year that the policy was illegal.
Citing an appeals court decision in April, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said in an order issued Wednesday that he had no choice but to rule in the administration’s favor.
Last August, in a suit brought by two researchers opposed to human embryonic stem cell research, Lamberth had ruled that the administration’s policy violated the so-called Dickey-Wicker amendment.
Enacted by Congress in 1996, the amendment prohibits use of federal funds for research that destroys human embryos.
Lamberth ordered a halt to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research freed up by the administration’s policy, issued shortly after President Obama took office, which took down many of the restrictions put in place by President George W. Bush.
But the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided that Lamberth’s interpretation of the law was too narrow and that the Obama administration’s policy would probably withstand challenge when the law was read correctly.
Discovering the step-by-step details of the path embryonic cells take to develop into their final tissue type is the clinical goal of many stem cell biologists. To that end, Kenneth S. Zaret, PhD, professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and associate director of the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Cheng-Ran Xu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Zaret laboratory, looked at immature cells called progenitors and found a way to potentially predict their fate. They base this on how histones are marked by other proteins. Read about this research in the May 20, 2011 issue of SCIENCE.
