Our lab's latest publication is a collaboration with the group of Niki Kretsovali at the IMBB, FORTH. Appearing in Stem Cell Reports, this work by lead author and friend Christiana Hadjimichael shows that Promyelocytic Leukemia Protein (PML) is a key factor in the maintenance of pluripotency in mouse ES cells, exhibiting its control on a number of pathways including that of TGF-β at an early stage. Antonis Klonizakis, an undergraduate student from our group, was involved in the analysis of public gene expression datasets to show that PML knockdown cells resemble a state of primed differentiation, lying intermediate between ES and epiblast cells. Besides the main finding behind it, this work was, from our part, a manifestation of the inherent difficulties in assessing published results in view of their heterogeneity, the lack of sufficient reporting and standardization, all of which are issues that need to be addressed yesterday in want of a more efficient way of accumulating knowledge instead of simply piling up information. Stay tuned for a blog post on this (and other matters).
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