Roeland Nusse

Roeland Nusse, PhD, Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor in Cancer Research and the Reed-Hodgson Professor in Human Biology, Professor, Department of Developmental Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine

 Research Description: Dr. Nusse’s laboratory is interested in the growth, development and integrity of animal tissues, with a focus on stem cells. Wnt signaling is widely implicated in stem cell control, as a mechanism to regulate the number of stem cells in tissues. They identified Wnt-responsive stem cells by their expression of Axin2 (a common Wnt target gene) and generated a mouse strain with the CreERT2 recombination signal inserted into the Axin2 locus, Axin2-Cre. By clonal labeling, they showed that single stem cells differentiate into different cell types of the tissues of interest. Using this method, they have described novel populations of stem cells in various tissues, including in the liver and the pancreas. A recent line of research is to study the consequences of a fluctuating diet including fasting on cell turn-over in the liver and other organs involved in metabolism. They have collaborated with Seung Kim’s group over the years in several areas of diabetes research, including foundational studies to develop fruit flies for studies of hormones like insulin, and studies of Wnt regulation of islet beta-cell proliferation. Nusse also collaborates with Drs. Ahmed and Weissman to isolate hepatocytes from liver for studies of signaling and self-renewal. 

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Miao Y, Ha A, de Lau W, Yuki K, Santos AJM, You C, Geurts MH, Puschhof J, Pleguezuelos-Manzano C, Peng WC, Senlice R, Piani C, Buikema JW, Gbenedio OM, Vallon M, Yuan J, de Haan S, Hemrika W, Rösch K, Dang LT, Baker D, Ott M, Depeille P, Wu SM, Drost J, Nusse R, Roose JP, Piehler J, Boj SF, Janda CY, Clevers H, Kuo CJ, Garcia KC. Next-Generation Surrogate Wnts Support Organoid Growth and Deconvolute Frizzled Pleiotropy In Vivo. Cell Stem Cell. 2020 Nov 5;27(5):840-851.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2020.07.020. PMID: 32818433; PMCID: PMC7655723. 

  2. Wan DC, Morgan SL, Spencley AL, Mariano N, Chang EY, Shankar G, Luo Y, Li TH, Huh D, Huynh SK, Garcia JM, Dovey CM, Lumb J, Liu L, Brown KV, Bermudez A, Luong R, Zeng H, Mascetti VL, Pitteri SJ, Wang J, Tu H, Quarta M, Sebastiano V, Nusse R, Rando TA, Carette JE, Bazan JF, Wang KC. Honey bee Royalactin unlocks conserved pluripotency pathway in mammals. Nat Commun. 2018 Dec 4;9(1):5078. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-06256-4. PMID: 30510260; PMCID: PMC6277453. 

  3. Peng, W., Logan, C., Fish, M., Anbarchian, T., Aguisanda, F., Alvares-Verala, A., Wu, P., Jin, Y., Zhu, J., Grompe, M. Wang, B and Nusse, R. (2018). Tissue Repair Signals and In Vitro Culture: Inflammatory Cytokine TNF. Cell 175, p 1607. PMC6497386.