WIKIMEDIA, RAMAMale scientists could be skewing research results, according to a study published in Nature Methods this week (April 28). McGill University’s Jeff Mogil and his colleagues found that the scent of male experimenters—and even of other mammals—triggered a physiological stress response in mice, whereas female odors did not.
“It’s definitely a study that will impact the field of behavioral phenotyping for biomedical research,” behavioral biologist Lars Lewejohann of the University of Osnabrück told The Scientist. “It’s something that’s going to have to be in the back of the mind of any researcher doing [rodent] research,” agreed Robert Hallock from Skidmore college who, like Lewejohann, was not involved in the work.
NYSCF, DIETER EGLIWriting in Nature this week (April 28), scientists from the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute and their colleagues reported successfully reprogramming adult skin cells into human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Just two weeks ago (April 17), a team from Korea’s CHA Stem Cell Institute and the firm Advanced Cell Technologies reported similar success using SCNT to reprogram hESCs from adult skin cells, in Cell Stem Cell.
“This is an important demonstration that SCNT works and can be used to model and perhaps one day treat disease,” stem-cell researcher George Daley from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist.
CERAN AND PEREZDietary fiber is known to reduce appetite, and researchers have long attributed this trait to the release of gut hormones upon fermentation. But a study in mice suggested that some amount of acetate, a short-chain fatty acid produced as a result of fiber fermentation within the colon, actually infiltrates a food-intake-associated area of the brain, dampening appetite. Scientists from Imperial College London published a paper describing the phenomenon in Nature Communications this week (April 29).
