Itay Maza

TL;DR: It is shown that N6-methyladenosine (m6A), a messenger RNA (mRNA) modification present on transcripts of pluripotency factors, drives this transition from the pluripotent to the differentiated state.

TL;DR: The novel naive pluripotent cells validated herein retain molecular characteristics and functional properties that are highly similar to mouse naive ES cells, and distinct from conventional primed human pluripotency.

TL;DR: The findings uncover a dichotomous molecular function for the reprogramming factors, serving to reactivate endogenous pluripotency networks while simultaneously directly recruiting the Mbd3/NuRD repressor complex that potently restrains the reactivation of OSKM downstream target genes.

TL;DR: It is shown in mice and humans that the histone H3 methylated Lys’27 (H3K27) demethylase Utx regulates the efficient induction, rather than maintenance, of pluripotency, and highlights the principle that molecular regulators mediating loss of repressive chromatin during in vivo germ cell reprograming can be co-opted during in vitro reprogramming towards ground state pluripOTency.

TL;DR: Slncky is presented, a lncRNA discovery tool that produces a high-quality set of lncRNAs from RNA-sequencing data and further uses evolutionary constraint to prioritize lnc RNAs that are likely to be functionally important, and develops a sensitive alignment pipeline for aligning lnc RNA loci and proposes new evolutionary metrics relevant for analyzing sequence and transcript evolution.