A shout out to various members of my team who have been spending way too much time recently in dark basements imaging bits of placenta with the new lightsheet microscope (with much troubleshooting) and processing the resulting datasets… but the results when it works! 🤩 @anzpra1.bsky.social
Feels like it’s been a while between papers.. but pleased to say our latest is now out! Here we used the side-population technique to isolate trophoblast stem cells from term placentas, showing that in FGR they grow slower, die more easily, and have impaired differentiation. doi.org/10.1016/j.ye...
Here (in work led by Dr Anna Boss and her student Isha) we are imaging the blood vessels in the placenta (red) and the surrounding tissue (green) in 3D to see how the vascular architecture of the placenta is impacted by obesity.
This paper has been building for a while - started by gene expression work done by Teena Gamage in her PhD, and then contains almost all of Cherry Sun’s PhD work following this up in functional experiments. Amazing work by these two! 🤩
New record - got a manuscript outcome notification today for a paper I submitted in November 2023 🤯 TWENTY-ONE MONTHS to reach a first decision of minor revisions. The system is broken. 😒 #atleastitwasntrejected
When you didn’t get time for breakfast, but this appears at the end of your morning meeting 😍 Thanks team ABI, happy to keep drawing out these celebrations!
This helps explain why FGR placentas are smaller and less able to transport oxygen and nutrients to the baby. Knowing this will hopefully let us identify therapeutic strategies to target this upstream dysfunction, in turn improving a range of downstream consequences for the placenta.
And yes, I did send many follow up emails over this time, and threatened to pull it at least once!