HARUKO OBOKATAStimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, “is not a real phenomenon,” stem-cell biologist Paul Knoepfler of the University of California, Davis, told The Scientist after reviewing the latest replication attempts reported in Nature this week (September 23). Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology and their colleagues discussed their failures to reproduce STAP cells when using various published protocols.
“It’s always impossible to prove the negative, but you can at least say—under the conditions that were reported—that these were neither robust nor reproducible in the hands of labs that should’ve been expert enough to do it,” said George Daley of Harvard Medical School who analyzed—and helped lead—some of the STAP replication attempts.
ANA DOMINGOSFor the first time, scientists from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC) in Portugal and the Rockefeller University in New York City have found that some sympathetic neurons from the brain indeed terminate within white fat tissue. The team’s results were published in Cell this week (September 24).
“[The authors] took advantage of powerful techniques to solidify the strong suggestion that white adipose tissue is directly innervated by the central nervous system and clearly demonstrate that leptin activates this sympathetic input,” said Stephanie Fulton of the University of Montreal who was not involved in the ...
