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Adam visits the Leibniz Institute on Aging

Adam visited the Leibniz Institute on Aging – Fritz Lipmann Institute in Jena, Germany, on the rather idyllic (albeit hot) Saale river. He gave a seminar on recent work from the lab discussing models of stem cell aging, hosted by the Rudolph lab.

A new international grant jointly funded by the NSF and the DFG supports the collaborative research project of the MacLean/Rudolph labs in which we are investigating subpopulation dynamics of IGF pathway-perturbed hematopoietic stem cells throughout life.

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Paper out now: how do stem cells age?

Our commentary on stem cell aging in out now in Blood. In which we discuss a new research article that sheds light on the role of niche cells in hematopoietic stem cell aging. The Trowbridge lab reveals that a reduction in signals from mesenchymal stromal cells is in part responsible for the impaired hematopoiesis that occurs during aging. Yet a big open question remains: are the age-related changes to HSCs due to aged niche cells directly, or due to changes in cell-cell communication to HSCs mediated by systemic factors.

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Nikith begins medical school

Congratulations to lab alumni Nikith Kurella who has begun his journey at medical school at Vanderbilt. Nikith conducted research into Wnt signaling pathway dynamics during his time in the lab and contributed to popInfer: gene regulatory network inference for multi-omics data. Best of luck to you Nikith at Vanderbilt!

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Paper out now: a new model for metastatic cancer

Our collaborative study just published in Clinical & Experimental Metastasis describes “a new Neu” — a syngeneic model of spontaneously metastatic HER2‑positive breast cancer. This model offers us the ability to ask fascinating questions of the metastatic TME… watch this space for more to come soon! This was a large collaboration led by the lab of Evanthia Roussos Torres working closely with Jesse and Yingtong in our lab, plus contributions from others labs at Johns Hopkins.

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Riddhee award a USC SURF fellowship

Congratulations to Riddhee Mehta who has been awarded a USC SURF fellowship to continue her research in the lab over the summer. Riddhee is a QBIO student working towards a Masters degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology while working in the lab on a project that studies the dynamics of EMT, co-mentored by MeiLu. Riddhee’s research has already led to new insights into EMT intermediate state dynamics.

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Paper out now: Gastrulation-stage gene Nipbl+/- expression mis-directs cell fates

Collaborative paper on which we contributed, led by the labs of Anne Calof and Arthur Lander at UC Irvine is out now in Science Advances (UCI news article here). We discovered a key role for heterogenous Nipbl+/- expression in mouse embryo fate mis-direction, mediated in part by Nanog overexpression. Use of CellRank for single-cell fate mapping helped to reveal the mis-direction of these gastrulation-stage cell fates. This collaboration was supported by an opportunity award grant to first-author Stephenson Chea at UCI and Jesse in the MacLean lab.

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Stem cells in the classroom

As a part of our ongoing effort to translate our research modeling stem cell biology into curricula appropriate from early K-12 education, Adam visited 3rd grade at Weemes Elementary School on Monday to discuss how math and computers help us to learn about stem cells. We also had a lot of fun playing stem cell superhero. (You can try the game out here)

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