Tom Burdon

TL;DR: Investigation of the role of STAT3 and inducible STAT3F in ES cells growing in the presence of LIF specifically abrogated self-renewal and promoted differentiation establish that STAT3 plays a central role in the maintenance of the pluripotential stem cell phenotype.

TL;DR: Signalling molecules activated downstream of gp130 in ES cells include STAT3, the protein tyrosine phosphatase SHP-2, and the mitogen-activated protein kinases, ERK1 and ERK2, which imply that the self-renewal signal from gp130 is a finely tuned balance of positive and negative effectors.

TL;DR: This model represents a new experimental system to identify compounds that reduce levels of α- synuclein, and to investigate the mechanistic basis of neurodegeneration caused by α-synuclein dysfunction.

TL;DR: This study compares orthologous chromosomal regions for which the human locus establishes prominent sites of Polycomb complex recruitment in pluripotent stem cells, whereas the corresponding mouse locus does not and establishes the primacy of local sequences in the encoding of chromatin state.

TL;DR: The role of intracellular signalling pathways in the maintenance of pluripotency and induction of differentiation in embryonic stem cell cultures and the mammalian embryo is discussed.