Amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, drawing widespread attention from the general public, press, and policymakers for the first time. This phenomenon has sharpened long-standing questions about the reliability of information shared prior to journal peer review. Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVertebrate macrophages are a highly heterogeneous cell population, but while blood is dominated by a macrophage-like lineage (plasmatocytes), until very recently these cells were considered to represent a homogeneous population. Here, we present our identification of enhancer elements labelling plasmatocyte subpopulations, which vary in abundance across development. These subpopulations exhibit functional differences compared to the overall population, including more potent injury responses and differential localisation and dynamics in pupae and adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe world continues to face a life-threatening viral pandemic. The virus underlying the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has caused over 98 million confirmed cases and 2.2 million deaths since January 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMacrophages encounter and clear apoptotic cells during normal development and homeostasis, including at numerous sites of pathology. Clearance of apoptotic cells has been intensively studied, but the effects of macrophage-apoptotic cell interactions on macrophage behaviour are poorly understood. Using Drosophila embryos, we have exploited the ease of manipulating cell death and apoptotic cell clearance in this model to identify that the loss of the apoptotic cell clearance receptor Six-microns-under (Simu) leads to perturbation of macrophage migration and inflammatory responses via pathological levels of apoptotic cells.
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