Bicaudal-C Post-transcriptional regulator of cell fates and functions.

Bicaudal-C (Bicc1) is an evolutionarily conserved RNA binding protein that functions in a regulatory capacity in a variety of contexts. It was originally identified as a genetic locus in that when disrupted resulted in radical changes in early development. In the most extreme phenotypes embryos carrying mutations developed with mirror image duplications of posterior structures and it was this striking phenotype that was responsible for the name Bicaudal.

Chemically induced senescence in human stem cell-derived neurons promotes phenotypic presentation of neurodegeneration.

Modeling age-related neurodegenerative disorders with human stem cells are difficult due to the embryonic nature of stem cell-derived neurons. We developed a chemical cocktail to induce senescence of iPSC-derived neurons to address this challenge. We first screened small molecules that induce embryonic fibroblasts to exhibit features characteristic of aged fibroblasts.

Fast Generation of Functional Subtype Astrocytes from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells.

Differentiation of astrocytes from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) is a tedious and variable process. This hampers the study of hPSC-generated astrocytes in disease processes and drug development. By using CRISPR/Cas9-mediated inducible expression of NFIA or NFIA plus SOX9 in hPSCs, we developed a method to efficiently generate astrocytes in 4-7 weeks.