Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

Preprints: How To Advance Your Research!

Image
The pace of science is accelerating. Papers are becoming ever more interdisciplinary and complex, and the revision process is turning more and more arduous. As jobs become more competitive, the pressure to publish in top impact journals keeps getting higher. The result of all this is that high quality submissions are suffering from unacceptably long publishing queues, which negatively impacts the dissemination of important results. To accelerate the speed at which important findings are shared with the global scientific community, researchers in physics, economics, mathematics and computer sciences have long used the preprint model. This involves depositing a finished manuscript in an open access preprint server for the community to interpret, judge and ultimately learn from. The server operators minimally check the manuscript for appropriate content, but do not judge or peer-review the science. Thus, a preprint does not substitute for properly peer-reviewed research in an indexed jou...

Exploring Experimental Hematology: November 2020 (Volume 42)

Image
In this issue of Simply Blood , we are deconstructing an invited perspective from Experimental Hematology as  Dr. Forsberg and colleagues build on their interesting prior work on differentiation of tissue resident macrophages (trMacs) via an interleukin-7 a   receptor (IL7R a )-positive progenitor (Leung et al. 2019). trMac differentiation follows a ‘nontraditional’ pathway of myeloid cell specification occurring in fetal hematopoiesis. In this study, they now examine the role of IL-7 signaling in the maintenance of other tissue myeloid cells - neutrophils and eosinophils - in the lung, work directed at better understanding the immune system of the lung and its relationship to respiratory diseases. First, the authors examined lung B-cell, neutrophil, and eosinophil content in Flk2 -/- , IL7R a -/- , or combined knock-out mice. Dr. Forsberg had previously shown that all ‘traditional’ adult myeloid and lymphoid cells, but not trMacs, develop via a Flk2-positive progenitor (Be...