This event was co-organized by Kathrin Leppek @katleppek.bsky.social and me and generously supported by @rnasociety.bsky.social, @immagina.bsky.social, @sitoolsbiotech.bsky.social, @nebiolabs.bsky.social, Twist Biosciences and Lexogen.

Wonderful work, congratulations Leo and team! 🥳

Thank you, Kathrin 🫶🏻

We’re so excited to finally share this with the world. Have a read and let us know what you think! 🧬🚀

And a huge thanks to all of our collaborators, especially Yasmin Barenco Abbas from the Tessarz lab @petertessarz.bsky.social for expertly carrying out the CUT&RUN experiments and Patrick Giavalisco for being our metabolomics guru, we couldn’t have done it without you! 🧪✨

I am incredibly proud of this work and want to give a massive shoutout to our amazing first authors Virginia Kroef and Lea Hund, with Virginia leading the charge from day one! 💪👏

We can show that the generated acetate is essential for lipid synthesis and histone acetylation, both key for exiting pluripotency.
💥 In other words: we’ve identified a previously hidden metabolic route that connects phosphate sugar metabolism to stem cell fate decisions!

This project uncovers a brand-new metabolic link in stem cells, showing how the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway (HBP) does not just make UDP-GlcNAc for glycosylation, but also fuels acetate production via the enzyme AMDHD2 utilising N-acetylgucosamine-6-phosphate(GlcNAc6P).