Blood from lungs! Interview with Emma Lefrançais on platelet production in lungs!

Blood nourishes every part of our body. It is generated every day to carry oxygen and food towards, and garbage away from every cell. Our lungs breathe in the oxygen that goes to the blood and remove carbon dioxide from it. Do lungs passively interact with circulating blood, or can they even generate new blood cells and spread them through the body?

Emma and colleagues wanted to test lungs as an active area of blood production. For this, they live imaged the blood cells within the lungs of mice. This amazing feat showed them platelets being born inside of the lung. And this pool of platelets were not a minority, but a significant part of blood count. Not only did they find platelet birth, but they also found blood stem cells living in the lung. These cells could, under certain conditions, help recover many types of blood cells! To know more about this exciting and profound discovery, please listen to Emma.


For more information, please refer to:
The lung is a site of platelet biogenesis and a reservoir for haematopoietic progenitors
Lefrançais et al., Nature, 2017

Engineering a Wolverine!! -- Interview with Junsu Kang about regeneration specific regulatory elements!

Let's imagine you are the scientist responsible for engineering a human into a mutant capable of recovering from any and all injury, like Wolverine. You would need to 'program' his genetic content to do a few things. Firstly, his body has to recognize the injury rapidly and respond to it strongly. Secondly, it should produce a potent healing genetic network, which will mostly include cell proliferative genes. Thirdly, but most importantly, this program has to be tightly controlled so that it does not have background leakage making his body defective and giving him a zillion cancers in the process. Seems like a stretch, doesn't it!

Well, seems like the puzzle might not be so enigmatic after all. Regulatory elements in our genome control gene expression in temporal and spatial manner. If one could isolate regions that are capable of tightly controlling expression between injury and recovery period, then one could use them to drive 'helpful' healing networks for enhancing regenerative abilities, without the side-effect of inducing cancer. But is it possible? Junsu and colleagues show us how to identify and characterize such regions! Please listen in to know more.


For further information, please refer to:
Modulation of tissue repair by regeneration enhancer elements.
Kang et al., Nature 532, 201–206 (14 April 2016)

A cubist view of organogenesis - Interview with Chen-Hui Chen and Matt Foglia about multicolor imaging in zebrafish!

Skin is possibly the most commonly injured organ, while heart injury is the most fatal. Our skin, a barrier that protects from the harshness of the outside world, is easily bruised and scratched - remember bumping into table edges; while heart attacks kill more than 15 million people annually. Understanding the development, maintenance and regeneration of these organs would help deal with such calamities better.

Chen-Hui Chen and Matthew Foglia along with their colleagues set out to so. They study zebrafish skin and heart to understand the cellular behaviors in multiple contexts, but they do so with a colorful twist. They transform into cubist artist, like Picasso, and paint the various cells constituting the organ with vibrant colors. This gives each cell its own identity, allowing vivid observations on how the various components of the organ are interacting with each other. Such interactions lets them paint (pun intended) pictures with precise cellular resolution, opening the path for studying a multitude of biological questions. Please listen in to understand the magic and its implications.




To know more, please read the following:
Multicolor Cell Barcoding Technology for Long-Term Surveillance of Epithelial Regeneration in Zebrafish
Chen CH et al., Developmental Cell 2016.

Multicolor mapping of the cardiomyocyte proliferation dynamics that construct the atrium.
Foglia MJ et al., Development 2016.

Introduction and closing remarks by Priyanka Oberoi.