Alessandro Bertero

Excited to see our work on the cover of @molsystbiol.org! Cover art by Laura Seclì shows barcoded #stemcell clones navigating inducible perturbations: iPS2-seq reads each trajectory, and catcheR sorts clones—highlighting SMAD2 as a key #cardiac regulator and capturing epigenetically biased outliers.

iPS2-seq is a clone-aware platform for #singlecell loss-of-function screening in #hiPSCs and derivatives including #organoids, here revealing SMAD2 role in cardiac progenitor specification from @berterolab.bsky.social @mendjanlab.bsky.social #functionalgenomics ➡️ link.springer.com/article/10.1...

💸 Stem cell culture that’s ~95% cheaper and weekend-free: a win-win for PIs and trainees!
Our revised manuscript is online at ORE: open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-1...

Benchmarked across cell lines & differentiation protocols, including scRNA-seq — with lessons for #cultivatedmeat too!

A tour de force that elevates the #CALIPERS technology to a whole new level! A must read for all iPSCs, cell cycle, and developmental biology aficionados.

#CALIPERSv2 🚀 preprint is locked—journal submission next. Final polish, more hiPSC reference lines, and fresh light-sheet data. Still, a great collaboration led by @moisesdisante with the team @LabPhysiology and the amazing @berterolab.bsky.social and @florianjug.bsky.social group members! 1/N

This is the way forward: here’s hope the “Fondo Italiano per la Scienza” will embrace this model instead of performing long, expensive, and less rigorous new evaluations (plus asking scientists to rewrite in ~half the space an already dense project)

The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers From RFK Jr. to Hollywood A-listers and Democratic senators, people across the political spectrum are jumping onto the slippery slope of nature-based solutionism.

This is such an important article, about the simplistic visions now pushing aside scientific research and complex social issues. A must read. newrepublic.com/article/1933...

Yup. What an effective way to speed up the sixth mass extinction

NIH has rescinded its scientific integrity policy. Hard to see this as anything other than clearing the way for shoddy research on things like vaccines. Regardless of the rationale, it's bad news for public health.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Blood chilling list. The nightmare continues

Honored to be recognized as a 2025 @isscr.org Public Service Award Honoree for my commitment to the Early Career Advisory Committee! Supporting early-career scientists has been a rewarding journey I am very proud of. Read more about the award and my fellow honorees: invt.io/1lxbo0wcokz

The ISSCR Signs on to Coalition Letter in Support of NIH — International Society for Stem Cell Research The ISSCR joined with Research!America, hundreds of biomedical research organizations, and thousands of private citizens from the U.S. scientific community to urge House and Senate appropriators to av...

#ISSCR joined hundreds of biomedical research organizations to urge House and Senate appropriators to support robust funding for NIH & avoid drastic measures that will slow scientific progress and weaken the U.S. research ecosystem. www.isscr.org/isscr-news/t...

National Facilities - Human Technopole

🚀 The first 2025 Call for Access for our National Facilities is now open! Researchers can apply for cutting-edge services in the fields of omics, imaging and data analysis. Submit your proposal by 31 May!

Apply here 👉 humantechnopole.it/en/national-...

It’s a startup, so only time will tell if it will catch on and scale, but the technology seems solid

Indeed; we need innovations also in these sectors, such as the zero-emission brakes from #pointzero: www.point-zero.it

FEBS Press The toolbox to manipulate gene function in human pluripotent stem cell models is large and growing: we review the state-of-the-art methods to perform robust loss-, gain-, and change-of-function studi...

Thanks to @erc.europa.eu for funding and publishing support, as well as @ec.europa.eu #NRRP & Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Foundation #CDA. If you made it this far, you may also be interested in our recent @febspress.bsky.social review on this topic: febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 10/10

This is our second study on Open Research Europe, the @erc.europa.eu platform with transparent post-publication peer review, full open access, and no outrageous fees. I couldn’t be happier with this choice for both me and my student: a real breath of fresh air in today’s publishing landscape. 9/10

Here’s where we stand: I hope this helps others facing the same issue! Our manuscript formally passed peer review, but we're still tackling the reviewers’ remaining concerns (more on this below). Always open to suggestions: this is how science should work, IMHO. 8/10

Running low on options, we learned of Antonella Fidanza's @elife.bsky.social study using sodium butyrate to enhance a similar dox-inducible system. This strategy finally gave us >90% response in hiPSC-CMs—an effective fix, though relying on an epigenetic modulator isn't always ideal. 7/10

With AAVS1 silencing now widely reported, we turned to the CLYBL locus—touted as a better alternative in @plosone.org a few years back (journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...). Even when using insulators as in the original study, we saw mixed results: a glass half full, half empty, once again. 6/10

As we searched for answers, @johanneszuber.bsky.social kindly pointed us to an elegant @cp-cellrepmethods.bsky.social paper using a UCOE to stabilize TRE3VG (doi.org/10.1016/j.cr...). It improved inducibility in hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, but was still far from perfect in this hard setting 5/10

For years, I suspected that the alternative dox-inducible promoter T11 might help. But between postdoc on other topics and a pandemic, testing had to wait—until Michelle, a master’s student in my lab, took on the challenge. Turns out I was dead wrong: it was worse than standard TRE3VG in hPSCs! 4/10

Turns out, this wasn’t just bad luck: it was a widespread issue, well-known yet rarely reported (as negative results often are). Why does it matter? Robust inducible gain-of-function experiments are crucial for both discovery and translational studies, and hPSCs are the most versatile cell type 310

This issue has frustrated me for a decade! During my PhD, we found that an otherwise excellent dox-inducible system failed to activate in many hPSC-derived cell types—including my favorite: cardiomyocytes. Fig. S7 from our @dev-journal.bsky.social paper 2/10

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Struggling with #silencing of doxycycline-inducible transgenes in human pluripotent #stemcell derived lineages? You're not alone! In my very first #skeetorial I break down our latest paper on potential solutions to this common problem. Read on! 1/10

open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-2...

Amazing finding that could have broad implications also for cultivated meat production

Superb review from my friends and colleagues in @porpolab.bsky.social that helped me finally grasp the complexity of this often-overlooked disease in cancer patients. Bookmark it and give the authors a follow!

Brilliant work from @grazianomartello.bsky.social, tackling a major shift in the stem cell field to unlock large-scale experimentation with naïve human pluripotent stem cells. Great to see so many friends on the author list—science truly takes a village!

Seeing is believing! My friends and colleagues in Pavia have delivered a tour de force, packed with stunning images. @fspasqualini.bsky.social is reshaping how I see biology—his preprints might just change your perspective too!

Hello @bsky.app! Excited to join this island of science escapism in a world going madder each day. We’re the Armenise-Harvard Lab of Genome Architecting at the University of Torino, Italy, applying #stemcell, #CRISPR, #genomics, and #imaging to explore heart #development, #regeneration, and #cellag.