Hidden Passages

Carefully managing immune responses to injury and infection is critical to survival: during inflammation, immune cells flock to damaged areas to defend the body, but an excessive response can also be dangerous, threatening organ function. To explore inflammatory responses in more detail, researchers working with mice labelled immune cells known as neutrophils, from the marrow of different bones, with coloured dyes. After a stroke, they found that immune cells recruited to the brain came primarily from the skull’s bone marrow, reaching the brain through microscopic channels. Shown here in a mouse skull, joining the marrow (above) to the inner surface of the skull (below), these channels enable quick communication between the brain and bone marrow. Although we do not yet know whether immune cells travel along these channels in humans as they do in mice, studying these connections could be important for understanding the regulation of inflammation in the brain.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Emmanuelle Briolat

Writer

A researcher specialising in visual signals in Lepidoptera, camouflage and the effects of light pollution, Emmanuelle’s writing covers a range of topics, from biomedical research to children’s books about moth defences.

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• Image from work by Fanny Herisson and colleagues
• Center for Systems Biology, Department of Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Copyright held by Nature Publishing Group 2018
• Published in Nature Neuroscience, August 2018