Editor's Summary

1 January 2009

A bone-marrow niche

Haematopoietic stem cells are found in a specialized regulatory environment or niche in bone marrow. The precise location and characteristics of this niche are now made clearer by two sophisticated imaging studies. Lo Celso et al. performed live-animal tracking of individual haematopoietic cells and find that osteoblasts are enmeshed in microvessels and that different haematopoietic cell populations are localized in different areas according to their stage of differentiation. Xie et al. used newly developed ex vivo real-time imaging technology and immunoassays to trace the homing of fluorescently labelled haematopoietic stem cells in response to irradiation. They report that the membrane lining the medullary cavity of bone forms a special zone that normally maintains haematopoietic stem cells, but promotes their expansion in response to bone marrow damage.

Letter: Live-animal tracking of individual haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells in their niche

Cristina Lo Celso, Heather E. Fleming, Juwell W. Wu, Cher X. Zhao, Sam Miake-Lye, Joji Fujisaki, Daniel Côté, David W. Rowe, Charles P. Lin & David T. Scadden

doi:10.1038/nature07434

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,303K) | Supplementary information

Letter: Detection of functional haematopoietic stem cell niche using real-time imaging

Yucai Xie, Tong Yin, Winfried Wiegraebe, Xi C. He, Diana Miller, Danny Stark, Katherine Perko, Richard Alexander, Joel Schwartz, Justin C. Grindley, Jungeun Park, Jeff S. Haug, Joshua P. Wunderlich, Hua Li, Simon Zhang, Teri Johnson, Ricardo A. Feldman & Linheng Li

doi:10.1038/nature07639

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,033K) | Supplementary information