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The UMU Immunization, Inflammation and Cancer (IIC) research group has published a review on the role of inflammation during the formation of blood stem cells in the impact journal Trends in Cell Biology.
In this article, the group led by Victoriano Mulero and with the collaboration of Dr. Traver of the University of California, San Diego, first conceives the concept of inflammation during embryonic development as a physiological process of great relevance for form the blood or hematopoietic cells of our organism.
So far, when a patient, due to a disease, needs blood cells, a transfusion or transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells is necessary, provided that the patient and donor are compatible, which limits the process.
These results could serve, as explained Mulero, "to help generate blood cells in the laboratory from cells of other lineages of the patient himself."
"Researchers have for many years been trying to form hematopoietic stem cells in the laboratory, and in addition, trying to get them from the patient itself, so that a small sample of the skin can be extracted simply, to transform those cells in hematopoietic stem cells, so that an autotransplant can be performed on the patient without any incompatibility, "says the professor in Biology.
For this project, the team has researched on the zebrafish model, since "being transparent allows us to study in a relatively simple way how hematopoietic stem cells form in the embryo and what signals are necessary for its formation," says Mulero .
This review was born from its publication in the high impact journal Cell in 2015. In it they demonstrated how inflammation regulates the process of formation of these hematopoietic cells, or in other words, the precursors of all the blood cells that inhabit our body and they need to be renewed, since they have a relatively short life.
Hematopoietic stem cells only form once in the embryo and it is in that process that the inflammation intervenes, a fact that until now has not been related.
At the same time as this publication saw the light, other research groups disseminated articles in which they yielded these same results through other models, fact that gave more relevance to the finding.
The formation of these cells is still not well understood.
With this set of articles new signals are known that participate in this process and that may be necessary to form these hematopoietic stem cells 'in vitro'.
Currently, the group continues to work in these studies with zebrafish to understand how these cells differentiate and transform into other types of blood cells, focusing mainly on the formation of neutrophils and macrophages, the main defenders of our body at the cellular level.
"We have discovered signs that are related to the immune response and are also involved in the process of differentiation of these stem cells," explains the researcher.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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