March 17 (St. Patrick's Day) journal club

Note: This meeting will be in W2015, one of the small classrooms on the SPH 2nd floor facing Wolfe St.

Melanie from the Matunis lab will be presenting:

Kanatsu-Shinohara et al., Homing of Mouse Spermatogonial Stem Cells to Germline Niche Depends on β1-Integrin
Cell Stem Cell, 3:533-542 (November 6, 2008)

Here is her comment on this paper:
"A key characteristic of stem cells is their ability to migrate back to and repopulate their niches. For example, following male germ cell transplantation in mice, infertile testes quickly regain spermatogenesis. This paper shows how spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) home back into and migrate into the niche in a β1-integrin-dependent manner where they reinitiate and maintain spermatogenesis.

This paper is relevant to our work because stem cell adhesion to a niche is a universal feature of stem cells and because we find that integrin plays a role in the coordinate regulation of the two known stem cell types in the Drosophila spermatogonial niche: the germline stem cells (GSCs) and cyst progenitor cells (CPCs), which both require cell autonomous JAK/STAT pathway activation for their maintenance."