Cell’s Superhero Cover: the role of comics in science popularization

I’ve just realized how cool is Cell magazine May 4 issue’s cover (the one with the Scientist Enter the Blogosphere report by Laura Bonetta) with the S-nitrosothiol superhero T-shirt. This substance may have some therapeutic utility in diseases such as heart failure and asthma.

Illustration: Cell and me this morning.

Cartoons are terrific education tools, let’s consider howtoons for instance. Howtoons are cartoons showing kids of all ages “How To” build things. What about cartoons for scientists?

Regaining self-renewal: actual and potential stem cells

Have you ever thought that transit-amplifying progenitor cells have the potential to repopulate the damaged stem cell niche through regaining self-renewal capability in vivo? According to András Simon and Jonas Frisén in Cell’s From Stem Cell to Progenitor and Back Again: “It has long been suspected that cells other than those that maintain homeostasis (actual stem cells) can take over stem cell function in certain situations, and they have been referred to as potential stem cells (Potten and Loeffler, 1990).” In a recent study in Developmental Cell, Nakagawa et al. (2007) pulse-labeled undifferentiated cells in the mouse male germline using an inducible genetic recombination system. Their results indicate that “the stem cells that maintain normal homeostasis do not appear to be the same cell population that repopulates the niche after transplantation and regeneration.” Indeed it seems that transit-amplifying progenitor cells are potential stem cells in this system and when actual stem cells are lost due to an injury or perhaps naturally over time, the remaining progenitor cells or progenitor cells acquired by transplantation have the potential to acquire stem cell functions.

Figure 7 from Nakagawa et al. (2007). A Model of the Spermatogenic Stem Cell Compartments