Choosing a proper title for the thesis: The physiologic role of stem cells…

In my last “live” thesis post I said that the first steps of building a thesis are: figuring out a unifying concept behind all my experimental work and finding a proper thesis title.

During my PhD work I’ve done various stem cell transplantations (local and systemic) into brain, heart, muscle tissues using different stem cell sources, just like freshly isolated bone marrow derived cells (hematopoietic, mesenchymal stem cells), murine embryonic stem cells, cultured hematopoietic stem cells. And I was heavily involved in the mechanisms by which exogenous stem cells can contribute to host tissues and the way these exogenous cells and lesion models can motilize the built in endogenuous stem and progenitor cell populations. So for me the unifying concept behind is a kind of systemic approach, that is to collect many stem cell data from various tissues, organs, compare them to each other and derive some unifying principles from them that could be adapted to other tissue environments too. And I really would like to introduce some systemic point of view into stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.

Next is finding a proper title for the thesis which embraces the systemic concept, simple but scientific enough to be approved by the academic people. Also it must be broad enough and not too restricted.

My first, rough idea was: Stem cells‘ regenerative mechanisms in tissues with different regenerative potential (turnover)

But this is too complex and problematic, for one the term “regenerative” is used twice, which is no good and circular a bit, for two, the concept of turnover interpreted in that level is not really clear to me.

So I figured out 3 new titles and after a little brainstorming with my colleagues during lunch (lunch with a good food is generally brilliant for heavy scientific info change and soft networking too, the Google guys were so aware of the food phenom) this title seemed to be the winner: The physiologic role of stem cells in tissues with different regenerative potential

Here the old school term “physiologic” is just a joker term and also refers to the fact that I worked at an Institute of Physiology.

Next thesis step is to delineate a rough intro content and some structural issues.