One of my candidate picks is this.
"Ketone Body Signaling Mediates Intestinal Stem Cell Homeostasis and Adaptation to Diet"
Published recently (8/22/2019) in a prestigious journal Cell by a group in MIT.
Link to the Summary: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30848-7
For the background, ...
(a) In the past 10-20 years, cancer stem cell hypothesis emerged, which states that cancer is developed from stem-like tumor-initiating cells. Consistently, cancer itself carries cell population that are like stem cells.
(b) Also in the past 10-20 years, our knowledge on stem cell-based tissue/organ homeostasis has advanced much. Normal organs, like brain, liver, lung, skin, intestine, etc, all use organ-specific stem cells to replenish the organ.
It has become important for us cancer researchers to understand the mechanism of stem cell-based organ replenishment, in order to understand mechanism of cancer development.
That is the reason of my picking up this paper.
Another background is that diet impacts metabolic pattern of cells. Especially, the differences between ketogenic diet and glucose-rich diet on the cellular metabolism have come to our attention.
That said, the paper reports that ketogenic diet can instruct intestinal stem cells toward self renewal, while glucose-rich diet can induce more differentiation.
In other words, stem cell-based tissue/organ homeostasis can be impacted by diet in intestine.
They identified a key enzyme, a major effector, and its target pathway, which add to the paper's novelty.
They are discussing whether this has an impact on cancer, as future research issue. In fact, diet is a major environmental factor for intestinal cells (in addition to microorganisms). It has been known that omega-6 fatty acid-rich western style diet increases colon cancer risk. Wonder how this new paper would merge with existing knowledge.
A little industry trivia. Scientific journals form a hierarchy for each field. Currently, impact factor (a metric indicating how many times the paper is cited by other researchers) is a determinant of a journal's position in the hierarchy. Like it or not, it is how this contemporary academic medical research industry has become.
And on top of the hierarchy, there are three commercial scientific journals; "Cell", "Nature", and "Science". They boast 30-40 impact factor. To put it in a perspective, top-ranked field-specific journals carry up to 10-12 impact factor (e.g., "Cancer Research" from American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Impact factor=9.13). Impact factor over 5 is usually considered decent.
This is a Cell paper. For us professionals, that means that we should read it at least to keep up with what is going on.
For us, that also means, there are many figures (6 big panels plus 6 supplementary panels that are also big). Cell papers usually are longer than Nature or Science papers. The text is written in rather straightforward manner, but it also includes segments apparently added to respond to reviewers' comments.
In some cases, a long paper with many figures is easier to talk about, because it has covered all the basis (supposedly) and is more convincing. I am hoping it is the case here.
I'll read it more critically to prepare for journal club, tomorrow.
[Graphic Abstract]
I made this Labor day weekend a nice and quiet weekend. Eyeglasses shopping, reading, stretching, washing cat, etc.
