I'M NUMBER ONE!

My latest paper got accepted for publication in the journal Development and I'm pretty stoked about it - a lot of time, energy, sweat, and even a few tears went into my most recent manuscript. After publishing, every scientist hopes that their work will be noticed and cited throughout the field. You can always go check online and see how many times your paper has been cited, or whether or not your paper has been deposited in the pubmed database.

Well, today I got a very nice surprise, however temporary it may be. One of the hottest topics in cell biology today is turning a terminally differentiated cell (like a skin cell) into a pluripotent stem cell (like an embryonic stem cell), which can then be used to make any other cell type you want. It's a pretty powerful phenomenon that promises to revolutionize regenerative medicine. The process by which a differentiated cell reverts back to a more pluripotent state is referred to as reprogramming.

Imagine my delight when, after going to the pubmed database and typing in "reprogramming" to see what the latest and greatest reports are saying, my very own paper showed up! Take a look at this screenshot:

Here are two zoom pics if you can't see it:

That's my name there - Cook MS! Now, as cool as this is, my excitement is a bit tempered for two reasons:

1) In a day or two, when the next paper with the keyword "reprogramming" comes into the database, my paper will be kicked out of the number one spot. It will stay in the list for "reprogramming", but everything is listed in chronological order of publishing date.

2) The subject of my paper was not directly about turning differentiated cells into stem cells, nor did we (the authors) list "reprogramming" as a key word. The work is on a very related topic, but we do not include any direct reprogramming experiments - it seems as if the paper is listed because it has implications for and we discuss reprogramming. Still cool, but it's not as if we're changing a paradigm or anything.

However, for today I will revel in the knowledge that despite all of the research going on in the entire world about one of the hottest topics in stem cell biology, my paper is temporarily listed as number one in the pubmed research database associated with the term "reprogramming".

Woohoo!

Huge teratoma of the WHAT?!

Just published in the Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery is an article entitled "Huge teratoma of the face". That's right - the face.

It looks to be about as painful as it sounds too. Below and on the left is a picture of the 4-month old infant with the rapidly growing tumor (right before surgery); on the right is a picture of the girl at seven years of age (way after the surgery).

As the authors state:

The case we report was entirely benign, did not relate to vital structures and had no intracranial extension.

This made it possible to surgically remove the tumor without there being permanent damage to any vital function. As you can see from the images below, even the bones of the face were distorted by the growing mass.


A teratoma is the kind of tumor that I study in mice. We have a mouse model for testicular teratomas. These mice have a mutation in a particular gene that renders the protein made from that gene to not work. This causes misregulation of the germ cells (the cells that colonize the gonad and eventually give rise to sperm in the testis). In this particular mouse, the misregulation leads to a teratoma.

Teraomas have long fascinated biologists by their ability to grow incredibly fast and show amazing signs of organization and differentiation. They are thought to arise from very powerful, or pluripotent, cells such as germ cells. In this case, instead of colonizing the gonad, a germ cells got off course and wound up in the head and neck region. Normally if this kind of misguidance happens the cell can't survive and dies off. But sometimes (rarely) it doesn't die off, and instead begins to grow and develop outside of the proper environment. Overall, teratoma formation is a relatively rare sort of tumor, especially in the face.

Nevertheless, this demonstrates the power of the cells that make up your germline and give rise to your gametes. Remember that gametes (spermatocytes and oocytes) combine to give rise to the next generation. That power is harnessed very carefully by nature, and sometimes things go wrong. This study is a case in point.

Cellular Manipulations ... Stem Cells on the Rise

Just last week in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a report was published detailing how to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPS cells) through genetic manipulation without the use of viral vectors. This work was submitted by Keisuke Okita, Masato Nakagawa, Hong Hyenjong, and Shinya Yamanaka.

Dr. Yamanka and colleagues previously published research detailing their work creating iPS cells using retroviral and lentiviral vectors that randomly incorporate into the genome of the host cell. These incorporated genetic components used only three genes: Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4. The resulting iPS cells could differentiation into any cell type.

Though promising, clinical progress would be limited due to safety concerns using retroviral/lentiviral infection - it turns out this poses a seroius risk of activating or inactivating important host genes that could ultimately lead to cancer or other disastrous consequences.

Using this new plamist transfection reported this month, that risk is averted - though the efficiency of manipulation is actually lower. The successful cells could still be differentiated into progeny of all three germ layers, indicating the continued power in iPS cells derived using this newer method.

While efficiency issues still need to be worked out, this is a huge step forward and could soon be translated into the clinic with a lot more hard work.