WIKIMEDIA, RAMAIt wasn’t what they had initially planned for the transgenic mice they were studying, but Spanish scientists have created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) within diverse tissues of the live rodents. The in vivo-reprogrammed murine iPSCs the team described in Nature this week are not like other stem cells: not only can they form cells of all three germ layers, but also trophoblast-like cells, progenitors that help form the placenta, which embryonic stem cells typically do not form. Study coauthor Manuel Serrano from the Spanish National Cancer Research Center said that these iPSCs “are more primitive than the cells produced in vitro, and even more primitive that the cells taken from embryos.”
“What’s really remarkable is we’re still learning the ways the earliest embryonic cells segregate themselves to different lineages,” the Harvard Stem Cell Institute’s George Daley, who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist. “There’s something supportive about the in vivo environment.”
Serrano and his colleagues are now working to better understand the basic biology of the de-differentiated cells.
ANDERS ILLUMMegalomyrmex ants storm the gardens of fungus-growing species, feeding on resident broods and clipping the wings of virgin queens. It might seem that these socially parasitic critters do irreparable harm to the colonies they invade, but it turns out that the presence of Megalomyrmex visitors can actually do the host ants good. When the host species is attacked by another species of ant, Megalomyrmex defend the fungus-growing colony, using the alkaloid venom that helped them invade in the first place to fight the raiders and defend the fungal turf.
The Smithsonian Institution (SI)’s Natasha Mehdiabadi pointed out that such behaviors demonstrate “how ‘parasitic’ or ‘mutualistic’ relationships are not so clear-cut.”
Rachelle Adams of SI and her colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...
