Stem Cells

Bats rarely get sick from deadly viruses like Ebola and Nipah despite carrying them. Now, Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have found that while the SARS-CoV-2 virus can enter bat cells, the innate immune system prevents it from replicating and hijacking the cell's machinery.

Whitehead Institute Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues found that Rett Syndrome can cause significant mitochondrial dysfunction in astrocytes, a brain cell type that supports neurons, and in neurons that later acquire these mitochondria.

In Parkinson’s disease, clumps of sticky proteins trigger inflammation in the brain, leading to neuronal death. Whitehead Institute’s Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have now found that a mutation causing these proteins to misfold and become sticky can also turn the brain’s immune cells from friends to foes, possibly accelerating the progression of the disease.

Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues developed an approach to isolate and analyze phagosomes, which are an important organelle in microglia, a type of immune cell found in the brain. Microglia are involved in brain development, as well as neurodegeneration, brain cancer, and more so understanding their biology has many potential implications.

Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and collaborators developed a tool to reconstruct the family trees and individual states of cells in humans, revealing how blood cell production changes in old age.

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita and colleagues show that stem cells play a special role in maintaining ribosomal DNA, which they do by dividing asymmetrically.

Marine Krzisch is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab who works on making better models with which to study neurological diseases. We sat down with Marine to learn more about her and her experiences in and out of the lab.

A study on asymmetric cell division in fruit fly stem cells took an unexpected twist, revealing how a dividing stem cell “chooses” which of its daughters receives more ribosomal DNA in order to pass on enough of these essential genes to subsequent generations.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch designed a way to turn human pluripotent stem cells into insulin-resistant fat cells, providing a useful model for studying type 2 diabetes, a complex and slow-to-onset disease.