CELL*WISE

I obviously took some time off from this blog around the holidays, and now a very busy semester has once again begun. I hope to have CELL*WISE going at a steady rate again hopefully by this February. I plan to make some more improvements to certain features of the blog and of course also to be writing more frequent posts.

Last week I attended and presented at the 26th Scientific Conference of the Society of Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine (SPRBM). This was my first time at an SPRBM conference, but I was told that since they always have it in January, it is always somewhere warm. It's too bad that I missed it in recent past years when they went to Cancun and Hawaii! This year it was in beautiful Miami Beach (another first time for me) and the timing and theme of the conference happened to fit well with my current research. The theme this year was "Biomaterials and Extracellular Matrix in Regulating Cell Function". The keynote speakers, officers, council, and committe chairs are some of the leading researchers in areas such as cell and tissue engineering, stem cell biology, and biomaterials.

SPRBM was originally formed in 1980 in response to growing interest in the bioelectrical interactions in growth, repair, and adaptation, with the original scientific focus being electromagnetic processes. Gradually the society starting focusing on a wide range of physical processes (forces and stimuli) and their related effects in biology and medicine. Eventually, it became clear that better understanding of physical regulation could improve clinical practice in a wide variety of areas, such as the research and repair of orthopedic and soft tissues. As for the most recent SPRBM conference that I just attended, the majority of the focus was on tissue engineering (many types and applications), biomaterials, and stem cell biology and mechanobiology, along with the more traditional topics of biomechanics, and cellular and/or tissue regulation by physical stimuli (e.g. mechanical, electrical, magnetic, etc.).

The technical program of this year's 26th Conference of SPRBM is available here. One thing to note, is that the attendance of the SPRBM conference was a lot smaller than other much larger conferences that I have attended or presented at, such as BMES and TERMIS, which cover a broader range of topics. The conference took place in a single large room for three days, and I would say that I presented to about 50 people, which was the number of people usually in the room for most all of the other presentations. The main advantage of the small size, was that people could more easily interact with each other - asking questions, networking, and engaging in extended discussions. Regarding the current emphasis of tissue engineering, it was interesting to see how much this small society has evolved, considering its history. One night at a gala dinner, Dr. Arthur Coury, Vice President of Genzyme Biomaterials, gave an interesting speech titled "Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine, Scope and Success: The Ongoing Debate". Possibly more information on the contents of this rather inspirational speech in a future post. It was an especially nice change of pace for me, to be at a presentation given by a vice president of one of the largest biotechnology companies in the world which actually develops and markets engineered tissue-like products.

Also, look forward to a follow-up post highlighting many more tissue engineering/stem cell-related conferences that will happen throughout this new year.

Today, Time Magazine published their "Top 10" lists for 2007. There are 50 lists total, in 5 different categories.
All of the ones in the Science category are very interesting, and you can quickly view all of the slides of the top 10 slideshows for subcategories "Scientific Discoveries" and "Medical Breakthroughs" by clicking the links that I have provided below.
Within these subcategories, I will briefly note only the numbered items that are relevant to this blog.
Here are the links:

"Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2007" Time Magazine
#1 are the most recent "induced pluripotent stem cell" (IPS cells) breakthroughs, in which two groups "reprogrammed" human skin cells into embryonic stem cell-like cells, in other words cells that are similar yet not identical to embryonic stem cells, without any use or destruction of human embryos. The "reprogramming" involved inserting four particular stem cell-associated genes using retroviral vectors. To read more about very recent news about this stem (IPS) cell research and about the IPS "reprogramming" protocol click here for a great summary post by The Daily Transcript blog. In addition to new scientific publications, he also links to today's NY Times Science Section article featuring Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, which I found very interesting, as well as the informative comments of Dr. Alex Palazzo himself from The Daily Transcript.
#2 is titled "Human Mapped" and it refers to the publication of the entire genome of J. Craig Venter, the first such genome ever published of a single person (publication link).
#5 is is titled "Building a Human Heart Valve" and is about a team of researchers led by Dr. Magdi Yacoub engineering functional human heart-valve tissue using bone marrow stem cells (also known as "mesenchymal stem cells" or "multipotent stromal cells").

"Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2007" Time Magazine
#9 is titled "New Source for Stem Cells" and is about the discovery that the abundant amniotic fluid-derived stem (AFS) cells could have the potential to differentiate into almost any cell type. This was discovered and investigated by the research group led by Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Here is the Wake Forest University press release and the abstract of the published paper in Nature Biotechnology.

I don't have time to go into all the details and give much of my own opinion right now. I may possibly write a follow-up post.
For now, some quality links of the most popular stem cell news currently.

"From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path" Wired Science from Wired.com
In this article, you can click on a link (the first November 2007 link in the "timeline") to actually get the full scientific paper (PDF) from the Yamanaka lab group (Japan) titled "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors" published in Cell. Even I'm still waiting on getting the full paper from the Thomson lab group (Wisconsin) titled "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells" published just yesterday online in Science, because most people need a subscription of some sort.

Additional current articles from Wired.com:

"Why You Should Believe the Latest Stem Cells Breakthroughs"

"Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead into Gold'"

Other current news articles:

"Embryonic Stem Cells without embryos - they're here" VentureBeat (Life Sciences category)

"Skin Cells Can Become Embryonic Stem Cells" from NPR (where you can listen to an 8-minute audio of the news if that's more convenient for you)

"New Method Equalizes Stem Cell Debate" from NY Times (if you're into more of the political
viewpoint / impact)

Fellow bloggers are starting to write...and there will be many many more:

"Middle Ground For Stem Cells?" from Hope for Pandora

"Induced Pluripotent Cells from Adult Skin" from Fresh Brainz

"The Next Stage in the Stem Cell Debate Begins!" from Framing Science

This may be the beginning of the end of the controversy, but it is still just the beginning for these scientific methods. As with most anything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It will probably still take many years for improvement and before any of these techniques can be used clinically. The important (hyphenated) keyword right now is "embryonic stem cell-like".

I don't know if I'll have much time to write my own posts this week because of a lot of work and Thanksgiving (but trust me, they will start happening soon, and then I will stop with any excuses), so I would like to share these fun, thoughtful, and brief articles written by other people.

"Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming" (Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming. PLoS Comput Biol 3(10): e213 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030213), which is basically a condensed and annotated version of the excellent and timeless suggestions made by mathematician Richard Hamming in his 1986 talk "You and Your Research".
This was also summarized yesterday by the entertaining and informative blog Bayblab, with "10 Simple Rules to Be a Successful Scientist".

"15 Reasons to Be a Scientist" by a happy Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.

"10 Reasons NOT to Be a Scientist" by a frustrated Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.


And because I will be giving several presentations in the next couple months...

"10 Tips for Better Presentations" by Nick Oswald at Bitesize Bio.

Plus two more from the "Ten Simple Rules" series in PLoS (Public Library of Science):

"Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations" (Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations. PLoS Comput Biol 3(4): e77 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030077)

"Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation" (Erren TC, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation. PLoS Comput Biol 3(5): e102 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030102)

Thank you to Richard Hamming, the authors of the PLoS articles, Bayblab, Bitesize Bio, and to Jorge Cham at PHD Comics for the above comic strip image.

For anyone who may have visited CELL*WISE in the last week, you probably noticed that I totally changed the template. Actually, to let you know, it wasn't all done until now, so you may have viewed an incomplete version. I will always be updating and improving aspects of this blog, as I learn more and become more experienced, but for now the template is mostly done.

A major improvement was upgrading to a 3-column blog template. When I started this blog about 1 month ago, I just had a 2-column template before, and specifically the template was called Tekka. At first I liked the rather minimalist look of this template and it had some convenient unique features. For those of you who can remember it, I had a slightly different title header image which I created, and I don't even remember what else at this point. The main thing that I started to not like anymore was the 2-column template. Mostly because I had many link categories that kept growing, and the one sidebar I had to work with was getting quite long and looking somewhat disorganized.

Therefore, I now have the new 3-column template, which of course has the large middle column for posts, but also two sidebars on the left and the right. It even has three extra links at the top right of the blog, but I don't know what exactly I will use them for yet, so right now they don't link to anything important.
I like the look of this 3-column template very much now, and the idea was again to try to keep everything clean looking and organized in a somewhat logical way. By having two sidebars, it increases the number of items that the reader can see on their screen in one view.
There are still some little things that I want to change about this template, but I will have to go back into the HTML to fix these when I have more time.
For any readers who may have read my original"Welcome to CELL*WISE" post, the links available on the sidebars haven't changed themselves that much at all, just the look of them.

On the left sidebar, (after the blog description, my profile, and my blog archive) most all links are now within "drop-down menus". First, I even have "Labels for CELL*WISE" within a drop-down menu, because it is expected that this list may grow rather long with time. All of the other link categories within drop down menus should be rather self-explanatory. One thing to note for the link categories of "Biomedical Engineering", "Tissue Engineering", "Stem Cells", "Biomaterials", and "NanoBiotechnology" (which are all specific focus topics for this blog) is that the links contained in these drop down menus are mostly websites of organizations and/or directories that I feel to be the most relevant and prominent to each of these categories.

Oh, I just remembered, I still need to finish the link category "Companies". I have a list of about 50 companies that I need to add in there!

Instead of drop-down menus, I actually really wanted to have hierarchical menus, just like the one that is used for my Blog Archive, but I couldn't figure out how to have those for additional sidebar links lists. If anyone knows how to do this for Blogger Beta, please do leave a comment with any info.

The right sidebar is currently dedicated to the "Newsreel" powered by Google (select different keywords same as before), Ads by Google which are targeted specifically for this blog, and a Google search box. Everyday, I even find at least one very interesting article in the Newsreel, so this is still a great feature for daily news relevant to this blog.

I am sure that I will be adding many more interesting things to each sidebar as I learn more about all the new Blogger features and fun/useful add-ons for blogs. I definitely have plenty of room now!

But now I need to focus on the most important part of this blog - writing my own posts.
Now that all this new template stuff is done, I can finally write on my blog!
And now I'm too tired. I plan to get back into the groove of posting with my own style soon.