Recently, Nature published a paper that subverted most people's common sense. Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, found that the lungs have hematopoietic function, and its ability to produce blood cells is not low—in the mouse model, the number of platelets made by the lungs is more than half of the total. This has never been discovered before.
"This discovery undoubtedly illustrates the complex role of the lungs - they are not only used for breathing, but also important participants in the generation of key components of the blood," said Mark Looney, head of the paper at the University of California, San Francisco. "The results we observed in mice strongly suggest that the lungs also play a key role in human blood production."
10 million platelets per hour
The biggest player behind this breakthrough study is a technique called "two-photon live imaging", and Professor Looney is one of the co-inventors. This imaging technique allows researchers to perform extremely fine observations to see the behavior of individual cells in tiny blood vessels in the lungs of living mice.
Initially, researchers wanted to use this technology to understand the interaction between the immune system and platelets. To this end, they selected a genetically engineered mouse strain in which platelets emit bright green fluorescence. However, the scene under the microscope made everyone stunned: the researchers found that a large number of megakaryocytes accumulate in the blood vessels of the mouse's lungs, while textbooks believe that megakaryocytes mainly live in the bone marrow and are responsible for the production of platelets.
â–²In the lungs, there are many cells that reach platelet factor 4 (PF4) (red) (Source: Nature)
“When we see a lot of megakaryocytes living in the lungs, we know that we should study in this direction,†said Dr. Emma Lefrancais, co-first author of the paper.
As a result, researchers began to use this breakthrough imaging technique to continue to observe the lungs of mice. Soon, they got more data. According to statistics, these megakaryocytes can work at a rate of 10 million platelets per hour, which indicates that more than half of the platelets in mice are in the lungs, not in the bone marrow! In addition, researchers have found many different types of megakaryocyte cells and blood stem cells in the pulmonary blood vessels. They have been lying there quietly and have been ignored by humans for hundreds of years.
â–²The megakaryocytes in the lungs are synthesizing platelets (arrows) (Source: Nature)
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