Congrats!! 🥳

Many thanks to our collaborators, especially to my joint-first authors Ya Gao and Daisy Tan and to Ralf Jauch and Alex de Mendoza, and of course Georg Hochberg. This was an amazing collaboration.

This research provides new perspectives on the evolution of multicellularity - a major transition in life's history. It could have implications for developmental biology and regenerative medicine!
(9/n)

Our findings suggest that the evolution of animal stem cells might have involved repurposing pre-existing molecular tools, rather than inventing entirely new mechanisms.
(8/n)

Interestingly, while we found POU proteins in choanoflagellates too, they couldn't induce pluripotency. This suggests that POU factors needed further adaptations to function in animal stem cells.
(7/n)

This means that these ancient proteins have all the molecular features necessary to act as pioneer factors and induce stemness in mammalian cells. Pretty amazing for a 700-million-year-old protein!
(6/n)

Using ancestral sequence reconstruction, we "resurrected" ancient metazoan Sox proteins. These reconstructed proteins could also induce pluripotency in mice!
(5/n)

But here's the really cool part: choanoflagellate Sox proteins can replace mouse Sox2 in reprogramming mouse cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)!
(4/n)

We found Sox-like proteins in single-celled relatives of animals (choanoflagellates). Surprisingly, these ancient proteins can bind DNA just like their mammalian counterparts! 🧬🔍
(3/n)