Project description:Haematopoeisis emerges in the human fetal bone marrow (BM) at around 12 post conception weeks. This constitutes the second wave of definitive haematopoiesis following on from the first wave in fetal liver from around 6 post conception weeks. The BM emerges as the dominant site of haematopoiesis, responsible for lifelong blood and immune cell production. Yet, little is known about how the composition of the fetal BM, the microenvironment permissive to establishing haematopoiesis and the interplay with other sites of fetal haematopoiesis in fetal health or disease. Herein we utilise single cell RNA sequencing to describe fetal haematopoeisis throughout gestation and better understand the development of the human immune system.
Project description:Haematopoeisis emerges in the human fetal bone marrow (BM) at around 12 post conception weeks. This constitutes the second wave of definitive haematopoiesis following on from the first wave in fetal liver from around 6 post conception weeks. The BM emerges as the dominant site of haematopoiesis, responsible for lifelong blood and immune cell production. Yet, little is known about how the composition of the fetal BM, the microenvironment permissive to establishing haematopoiesis and the interplay with other sites of fetal haematopoiesis in fetal health or disease. Herein we utilise single cell RNA sequencing to describe fetal haematopoeisis throughout gestation and better understand the development of the human immune system.
Project description:Haematopoeisis emerges in the human fetal bone marrow (BM) at around 12 post conception weeks. This constitutes the second wave of definitive haematopoiesis following on from the first wave in fetal liver from around 6 post conception weeks. The BM emerges as the dominant site of haematopoiesis, responsible for lifelong blood and immune cell production. Yet, little is known about how the composition of the fetal BM, the microenvironment permissive to establishing haematopoiesis and the interplay with other sites of fetal haematopoiesis in fetal health or disease. Herein we utilise single cell RNA sequencing and surface protein characterisation using CITE-seq technology to describe fetal haematopoeisis throughout gestation and better understand the development of the human immune system.
Project description:Throughout postnatal life, haematopoiesis in the bone marrow (BM) maintains blood and immune cell production. Haematopoiesis first emerges in human BM at 11-12 post conception weeks while fetal liver (FL) haematopoiesis is still expanding. Yet, almost nothing is known about how fetal BM evolves to meet the highly specialised needs of the fetus and newborn infant. Here, we detail the development of fetal BM including stroma using single cell RNA-sequencing. We find that the full blood and immune cell repertoire is established in fetal BM in a short time window of 6-7 weeks early in the second trimester. Fetal BM promotes rapid and extensive diversification of myeloid cells, with granulocytes, eosinophils and dendritic cell subsets emerging for the first time. B-lymphocytes expansion occurs, in contrast with erythroid predominance in FL at the same gestational age. We identify transcriptional and functional differences that underlie tissue-specific identity and cellular diversification in fetal BM and FL. Finally, we reveal selective disruption of B-lymphocyte, erythroid and myeloid development due to cell intrinsic differentiation bias as well as extrinsic regulation through an altered microenvironment in the fetal BM from constitutional chromosome anomaly Down syndrome during this crucial developmental time window.
Project description:c-kit signaling plays pivotal roles in regulating the self-renewal and/or differentiation of many adult stem cells, such as hematopoietic stem cells. However, it remains controversial whether c-kit is expressed by and contribute to skeletal stem cells (SSCs). To test this, we lineage-traced c-kit+ cells and investigated the physiological importance of c-kit+ cells and c-kit signaling in bone development. We found that c-kit was not expressed by postnatal SSCs, but by fetal SSC precursors at the growth cartilage. Lineage-tracing of fetal c-kit+ cells marked approximately 20% of Lepr+ bone marrow stromal cells, generating nearly half of all osteoblasts in adult bone marrow. Disruption of mTOR signaling in c-kit+ cells impaired bone formation. Conditional deletion of Kitl (c-kit ligand, also known as Scf) from fetal, but not adult bone marrow stromal cells increased bone formation. Together, our work identified c-kit+ SSC precursors as an important source of bones formed during development. The osteogenic differentiation of these cells is temporally inhibited by Kitl from the bone marrow microenvironment.
Project description:ZFTA-RELA ependymoma presents a significant clinical challenge due to the lack of effective treatments, driving the need to explore novel immunotherapeutic strategies. Recent studies have identified the skull bone marrow as a source of meningeal immune cells critical for central nervous system (CNS) immunity, yet the role of these cells in childhood CNS tumour surveillance and pathology remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that intracranial childhood ependymoma tumours harbour a unique myeloid cell population, including hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) not from the blood, but supplied by adjacent skull bone marrow, ontogenetically distinct from their blood-derived counterparts. Our findings challenge the conventional view of HSCs as passive players in the CNS, revealing that antigen-specific interactions between skull bone marrow-derived HSCs and CD4+ T cells actively promote immunotolerance in childhood brain tumours by enhancing local myelopoiesis and inducing regulatory T cell polarization. This work uncovers a previously unrecognized cellular network linking the skull to brain tumours in children and underscores the therapeutic potential of modulating skull bone marrow haematopoiesis to shift the local immune environment. Targeting this skull-specific immune pathway offers a promising avenue for developing localized immunotherapies to improve treatment outcomes.