Blood from lungs! Interview with Emma Lefrançais on platelet production in lungs!

Blood nourishes every part of our body. It is generated every day to carry oxygen and food towards, and garbage away from every cell. Our lungs breathe in the oxygen that goes to the blood and remove carbon dioxide from it. Do lungs passively interact with circulating blood, or can they even generate new blood cells and spread them through the body?

Emma and colleagues wanted to test lungs as an active area of blood production. For this, they live imaged the blood cells within the lungs of mice. This amazing feat showed them platelets being born inside of the lung. And this pool of platelets were not a minority, but a significant part of blood count. Not only did they find platelet birth, but they also found blood stem cells living in the lung. These cells could, under certain conditions, help recover many types of blood cells! To know more about this exciting and profound discovery, please listen to Emma.


For more information, please refer to:
The lung is a site of platelet biogenesis and a reservoir for haematopoietic progenitors
Lefrançais et al., Nature, 2017

Fangs or Venom, what came first? Interview with Nicholas Casewell on evolution of venom in Blenny Fishes!

Most of us get scared at the sight of a snake. It is the fear of a poisonous bite that scares us. Even if the snake is not poisonous, it scares us! So, just looking like something that is deadly, is enough to scare potential predators. Mimicking deadly venomous animals can be a good evolutionary strategy. For example, in the following video the animal looks like a snake, but is actually a caterpillar!!

Nicholas and colleagues use blenny fish to understand the evolution of venom and fangs, the apparatus for providing the venom. They find that one specie of blenny fish contains venom, but multiple other species of blenny fish only contain fangs, but not the venom! It seems the species only containing the fang, but not the poison, are mimicking the poisonous specie and taking advantage of the threat of the deadly venom. Just having the fangs without the poison provides advantages, without actually putting energy into generating the poison. To know more, please listen to Nick.


To know more, please refer to :
The Evolution of Fangs, Venom, and Mimicry Systems in Blenny Fishes
Casewell, Visser, Baumann, Dobson, Han et al., Current Biology, 2017

Sex is in the details! Interview with Esther Saiz on gender influencing neuronal circuitry.

'Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.' But what differs between Mars and Venus. According to the author of the book, John Gray, the difference lies in the psyche. These differences could stem from different wiring inside the brain of individual sexes. With 100 billion neurons in the brain of typical human, and maybe as many as 1,000 trillion total connections, its a daunting task to answer this question.

Enter Esther and colleagues with their powerful model system C. elegans, which is a small transparent worm whose each and every cell in the body is accurately mapped along with most of cell's interacting partners. When they looked carefully at one neuron that differed between the sexes in C. elegans, they found a machinery that influenced the sex-specific maturation and behavior of that cell. Strikingly, this influence was not due to sexual hormones, but was wired inside the identity of the cell. So, just changing this one cell changed certain behaviors of the animal from one sex to another! To know more, please listen to Esther.


For further information, please refer to:
Sexually Dimorphic Differentiation of a C. elegans Hub Neuron Is Cell Autonomously Controlled by a Conserved Transcription Factor.
Saiz et al., Current Biology, 2017.
BioRxiv Link.

A Time to Spring! Interview with Julia Qüesta on cold sensation in plants!!

Winter ends and the layer of snow clears off the ground. The soil is fresh for new cycle of vegetation. It instantly converts to a beautiful expanse of flowers and fresh plants. How does such a drastic change occur? How did the plants 'know' the change in seasons. They don't have an almanac or the weather channel to tell them of the ending cold, or do they??

Julia and colleagues undertook to understand the sensing of winter-to-spring transformation in plants. It is possibly the most important decision for the survival of the plant. Arising anew from winter needs to be perfectly timed. A little early, and the frosty cold will chill the new life. A little late and the other plants would have taken away precious space and resources, making it difficult to fight for survival. And importantly, its a one time event: an on-off switch. The plant needs to integrate a million parameters into a single result. An elaborate chain of events culminating into a life or death choice.

How does the switch operate? Julia and colleagues map the system to basepair resolution by finding the machinery and its corresponding binding sites on the plant genome for controlling the process. This amazing feat (for plant and the team) is a perfect example of how simplicity underlies complex decision making. To understand more, please listen to Julia.



To know more, please refer to:
Arabidopsis transcriptional repressor VAL1 triggers Polycomb silencing at FLC during vernalization.
Qüesta et al., Science 2016.

A cubist view of organogenesis - Interview with Chen-Hui Chen and Matt Foglia about multicolor imaging in zebrafish!

Skin is possibly the most commonly injured organ, while heart injury is the most fatal. Our skin, a barrier that protects from the harshness of the outside world, is easily bruised and scratched - remember bumping into table edges; while heart attacks kill more than 15 million people annually. Understanding the development, maintenance and regeneration of these organs would help deal with such calamities better.

Chen-Hui Chen and Matthew Foglia along with their colleagues set out to so. They study zebrafish skin and heart to understand the cellular behaviors in multiple contexts, but they do so with a colorful twist. They transform into cubist artist, like Picasso, and paint the various cells constituting the organ with vibrant colors. This gives each cell its own identity, allowing vivid observations on how the various components of the organ are interacting with each other. Such interactions lets them paint (pun intended) pictures with precise cellular resolution, opening the path for studying a multitude of biological questions. Please listen in to understand the magic and its implications.




To know more, please read the following:
Multicolor Cell Barcoding Technology for Long-Term Surveillance of Epithelial Regeneration in Zebrafish
Chen CH et al., Developmental Cell 2016.

Multicolor mapping of the cardiomyocyte proliferation dynamics that construct the atrium.
Foglia MJ et al., Development 2016.

Introduction and closing remarks by Priyanka Oberoi.

A fat hope for autism! - Interview with Zhigang Xie on role of fatty acid metabolism in neuronal stem cells.

Autism is a distressful condition with impaired social interaction and communication. At its basis, it is a neurodevelopment disorder, with certain areas of the brain not developing properly. The burden of brain development falls on neural stem cells, which divide to generate functional neurons as well as maintaining their own numbers. Zhigang Xi and his colleagues show that fatty acid beta-oxidation seems to play a major role in maintaining the stem cells involved in autistic behavior. How is this achieved -- to know the answer, we call Zhigang Xi.


Please read the original article here:
Inborn Errors of Long-Chain Fatty Acid β-Oxidation Link Neural Stem Cell Self-Renewal to Autism
Xie et al., Cell Reports (2016). Volume 14, Issue 5, p991–999.

Call with David Matus

We interview Dr David Q. Matus to discuss how studying a single cell within a simple worm informs us about cancer metastasis and might help with developing better treatments against the disease.

David recently started his own lab in the department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University in New York. As a post-doc in the lab of Dave Sherwood at Duke University, Dave studied the anchor cell in the worm C. elegans. The anchor cell invades by breaching the basement membrane; a process very similar to what is used by cancer cell for metastasis. David found interesting link between cell cycle and the invasion behavior. His study suggests a requirement of cell cycle arrest for membrane invasion. This interesting link could be one reason why chemotherapy, which is directed towards killing dividing cells, fails to destroy all cancer cells. Metastasizing cells due to their inhibition of cell cycle, escape chemotherapy. Understanding the properties underlying invasion could lead to developing better compounds targeting the spread of cancer cells.

Please listen.

To learn more about David, visit his lab webpage.



Citations:
Invasive Cell Fate Requires G1 Cell-Cycle Arrest and Histone Deacetylase-Mediated Changes in Gene Expression
Matus et al., Developmental Cell, October 26, 2015.

Cell division and targeted cell cycle arrest opens and stabilizes basement membrane gaps
Matus et al., Nature Communications, June 13, 2014.