Carlos Guardia

A new week, a new selection of papers in #PlacentalCellBio
@biomednews.bsky.social

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

Take a look at this pick from the Jawerbaum's lab in Argentina: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40976335/

Enjoy!

Check this out: This is what the human fallopian tube looks like as one travels through its different sections.

We have developed a new 3D single-cell tissue mapping workflow to automatically/accurately detect ovarian cancer precancerous lesions (STICs).

More here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Impaired macroautophagy in oligodendrocyte precursor cells suppresses neuronal plasticity via a senescence-associated signaling Senescent OPCs, caused by a declined autophagy, suppress neuronal firing and excitatory transmission via CCL3/5-CCR5 signaling.

Impaired macroautophagy in oligodendrocyte precursor cells suppresses neuronal plasticity via a senescence-associated signaling | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Steric repulsion counteracts ER–to–lipid droplet protein movement Steric hindrance affects the relocation of ER-to-LD proteins and primarily regulates the LD proteome.

Steric repulsion counteracts ER–to–lipid droplet protein movement | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

AVID mouse: A versatile platform for real-time, multiscale ATP imaging and spatial systems metabolism analysis in living mice Ohnishi et al. present the AVID mouse, which enables real-time, multiscale imaging of ATP dynamics in vivo across organs and cell types. This platform reveals spatially heterogeneous changes in energy metabolism during both physiological conditions and pathological states such as myocardial infarction, enabling systems-level analysis of metabolic regulation.

AVID mouse: A versatile platform for real-time, multiscale ATP imaging and spatial systems metabolism analysis in living mice

New week, new summary of pubs in the #PlacentalCellBio
@biomednews.bsky.social

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

My personal fav: this study about placental plasticity to hypoxia pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40961454/

Enjoy!

Scientists decry NIH pledge to end some human fetal tissue research Move could signal return to ban on such studies imposed by first Trump administration

NIH says it will not renew a handful of research grants that an advocacy group identified as involving human fetal tissue—a decision that is setting off alarm bells for some in the scientific community. https://scim.ag/3VOoJJY

Leaflet-specific phospholipid imaging using genetically encoded proximity sensors - Nature Chemical Biology An approach combining bioorthogonal chemistry with genetically encoded fluorogen-activating proteins enables subcellular imaging of phospholipids and glycans, as well as the visualization of lipid tra...

Very excited to share new work out today in @natchembio.nature.com on a new approach - FACES - for selectively imaging of phospholipids and other biomolecules at spatial resolutions down to individual membrane leaflets (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Efficient stem cell-derived mouse embryo models for environmental studies - PubMed Blastoids are stem cell-derived structures that mimic natural blastocysts by incorporating all three lineages: trophectoderm, epiblast, and primitive endoderm. However, current methods often yield inc...

Here are the curated lists of pubs in the #PlacentalCellBio
@biomednews.bsky.social report from the last two weeks!

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...
biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

My personal choice: this resource from the Zernicka-Goetz's lab! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40882624/

Enjoy!

🚀 We’re all set!
This Sunday marks the return of the Placental Biology Course – our first in-person for six years. 25 participants joining for lectures and practical sessions delivered by experts in the field of placental biology!

Here are my pre-selected papers in @biomednews.bsky.social 's #PlacentalCellBio of the week 🧐

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

Having participated in this call as a member of the Fetal Membrane Society Consortium, my selfish pick for the week is: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40840313.

Cheers!

We hope next to dig deeper into the mechanistic aspects that can fully explain this phenotype, expand on early (development) and late (cancer, metabolic disease) trajectories, and interrogate key environmental stressors that could potentiate or inhibit the disruption in tissue-specific autophagy.

Now, we have confirmed this phenotype in mice, demonstrated fragmentation of mitochondria, ↑LC3B-II
& SQSTM1↑ puncta (incl. short isoforms) and Nrf2–NQO1 detox pathway upregulation. This led to hepatomegaly with disrupted cellular architecture but no signs of early cancer as seen in other ATG KOs.

The autophagy protein ATG9A enables lipid mobilization from lipid droplets - Nature Communications ATG9A is transmembrane autophagic machinery protein that delivers phospholipids to expanding autophagosomes. Mailler et al. show that ATG9A is required to mobilize lipids from lipid droplets for autop...

This story is a continuation of the work Elodie and I started while at @juanbonifacino.bsky.social lab where we observed lipid droplets accumulation in ATG9A KO cells and Atg9 KO worms: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Liver-specific loss of Atg9a perturbs lipid metabolism and hepatocyte integrity The autophagy-related protein ATG9A is integral to cellular autophagy and lipid mobilization, yet its importance in mammalian physiology remains underexplored. Using a liver-specific conditional At...

Excited to share the first paper from the lab! 🥳 The ATG9 and lipid droplets saga continues! Open source!

Laser flash melting cryo-EM samples to overcome preferred orientation - Nature Methods Individual proteins tend to adopt preferred orientations when subjected to vitrification for cryo-electron microscopy analysis. A laser flash melting procedure followed by rapid revitrification provid...

A laser flash melting procedure, followed by rapid revitrification, provides a simple approach to help mitigate the preferred orientation problem that plagues cryo-EM analysis.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Identification of organelle-specific #autophagy regulators from tandem #CRISPR screens. New study from Truc Losier, Karyn King, Maxime Rousseaux, and Ryan Russell (@russellbiolab.bsky.social) @uottawa.ca: rupress.org/jcb/article/...

#Biochemistry #CellSignaling

Here are the curated lists of pubs in the #PlacentalCellBio
@biomednews.bsky.social report from the last two weeks!

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...
biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

Lots of goodies but my personal choice: mTSCs from 32-cell morulae! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Enjoy!

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Identification of organelle-specific autophagy regulators from tandem CRISPR screens Losier et al. identify distinct kinase signaling pathways that differentially regulate bulk and selective autophagy. Using kinome-wide CRISPR screening, th

Identification of organelle-specific autophagy regulators from tandem CRISPR screens url: rupress.org/jcb/article-...

Dissection of surface area-dependent lipolysis at a single organelle level Ma et al. reveal that lipolysis is controlled by both lipase activity (biochemistry) and lipase-accessible lipid droplet surface area (biophysics). The derivative of the linear relationship between lipolytic flux and lipid droplet surface area is called lipolytic efficiency, which is equivalent to the lipase activity.

Dissection of surface area-dependent lipolysis at a single organelle level

Mouse trophectoderm stem cells generated with morula signalling inducers capture an early trophectoderm state - Nature Cell Biology Gao, Li and colleagues derive trophectoderm stem cells from 32-cell mouse embryos. These cells represent an early trophectoderm state and are capable of developing into placenta cells, forming placent...

🥂Congrats to Gao, Li & co for their new @natcellbio.nature.com study: they derive #trophectoderm stem cells from 32-cell mouse #embryos. These cells represent an early trophectoderm state, develop into #placenta cells and organoids and contribute to blastoid generation.
rdcu.be/eAKzp

bit.ly/4fyZ9Sg

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Establishment of human trophoblast stem cells from term smooth chorion - PubMed Ch-TS cells may serve as a valuable in vitro model for studying trophoblast biology and placenta-mediated pregnancy complications, similar to TS^CT^/blast cells.

Another week, another curated list of pubs in the #PlacentalCellBio @biomednews.bsky.social report:

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

My personal fav: hTSCs from the term fetal membrane! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40759063/

Enjoy!

The choice to have another pregnancy or not can be a difficult decision for #preeclampsia #eclampsia #HELLLPsyndrome survivors & their partners & is highly individualized. Speak with your patients during a preconception visit about what another pregnancy could look like for them

The transcription factor NR2F2 positively regulates the development of androgen-producing cells in the testes of fetal mice.
buff.ly/8SBhVjM

10 days left to apply for SDB #SciComm Internship. Deadline: August 15. www.sdbonline.org/science_comm...

Research Group Leader in Chemical/Synthetic Biology at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Start your UK & international job search for academic jobs, research jobs, science jobs and managerial jobs in leading universities and top...

We are looking to recruit a tenure track group leader in the field of Chemical/Synthetic Biology (in the broadest sense) to lead a research program within the Division of Protein & Nucleic Acid Chemistry ( www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNW809/r... ) at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

PIEZO1 drives trophoblast fusion and placental development - PubMed PIEZO1, a mechanosensor in endothelial cells, plays a critical role in fetal vascular development during embryogenesis. However, its expression and function in placental trophoblasts remain unexplored...

After another fantastic @ssrepro.bsky.social annual meeting, here you have last week's selected paper in the #PlacentalCellBio @biomednews.bsky.social report:

biomed.news/bims-placeb/...

Highlight from our neighbors at Duke with an interesting role of PIEZO1 in STB formation!

Enjoy!