Celebrating a Milestone: My First Cover Feature on Developmental Cell
- caterina di pietro
- Jan 10, 2024
- 2 min read
What a dream come true! Throughout my years immersed in doing science, the thought of having my artwork grace the cover of a prestigious journal like Developmental Cell was beyond my dreams!
Last year, I had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with two old friends, Giulia Coppiello and Xabier Aranguren, on designing a cover for the journal Developmental Cell. I met Giulia and Xabier during my time at the KU Leuven while I was working on my master thesis. Even then, I could tell they were destined for success. It was a joy to reunite and work together on such an important project in the stem cell field.
In this fascinating study, researchers used a lineage-specific cell ablation system to produce mouse embryos unable to form both the cardiac and vascular systems. Through intraspecies blastocyst complementation, they managed to rescue the development of these systems separately and together. The fact that the resulting chimeras reached adulthood without showing signs of histopathological defects in the heart and exhibited normal cardiac function is a significant milestone. Moreover, extending this method to rat-to-mouse blastocyst complementation and obtaining xenogeneic hearts with cardiomyocytes solely of rat origin is an impressive leap in the field.
This breakthrough brings us closer to generating transplantable organs in vivo, potentially transforming organ transplantation by overcoming rejection barriers.
Read the full story here: https://www.cell.com/developmental-cell/fulltext/S1534-5807(23)00552-X
🖌 The image on the cover depicts the microinjection process at morula stage of a mouse embryo that it is unable to form the cardiovascular system. The microinjected pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), artistically represented in various colors, will occupy the vacant developmental niche and will give rise to the formation of the heart and vessels. The resulting PSCs-derived heart is illustrated as a color amalgam, symbolizing the contribution of microinjected cells in its formation.
Big. congrats to Xabier Aranguren, Giulia Coppiello, Paula Barlabé and colleagues for the fantastic work! Continue moving forward, you're absolutely nailing it!
Comments