Library Secrets

Imagine an ancient library storing society’s most valuable accumulated knowledge, ready to be drawn from at any time of need. Enigmatic librarians catalogue, position, and care for the books, but their essential role is a mystery to outsiders. Antibody-producing cells line the shelves of the body’s bone marrow library, preserving long-term immunity, but how they're maintained has been difficult to study in humans. To investigate, a team has developed a lab-grown ‘bone marrow-on-a-chip’. They observed antibody-producing cells in two bone marrow environments, the perivascular niche, around blood vessels, and endosteal niche at the bone surface (pictured, bone marrow-supporting cells (orange) forming a layer within the chip, with their internal structural scaffolding highlighted in pink). By recreating both environments, the team could unpick their individual contributions and cooperative collaborations, and provide a platform to further understand the roles of bone marrow immune cells in ageing, immunity and disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Liana Kramer and colleagues
• Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, September 2026