Episode 24: Baby hearts, inflammation and precarious postdocs

Preprints in Motion

This week we discuss placental inflammation and heart development with postdoc Eleanor Jayne Ward and PI Suchita Nadkarni (@SciSuchita) from Queen Mary, University of London. In this preprint, the authors show that during embryonic heart development, neutrophils (innate immune cells) can sometimes cause placental inflammation. This inflammation leads to a loss of barrier function. In turn, this allows maternal monocytes (innate immune cells that develop into macrophages) to migrate into the embryonic heart. These monocytes alter the tissue resident embryonic macrophages and damage cardiac tissue. This cardiac damage continues postnatally. We discuss this and how limiting placental inflammation was enough to promote normal cardiac development. We also talk about the precarity of postdocs and why making research/postdoc a recognised profession would be an important step forward.

Read the full preprint on bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.10.482611v1.full

Visit the Nadkarni lab website https://www.qmul.ac.uk/whri/people/academic-staff/items/nadkarnisuchita.html

Read more about the reasons scientists preprint https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/833400v1

This episode was hosted by Jonny Coates, produced by Emma Wilson and edited by John D Howard.

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Produced by JEmJ Productions (find us on Twitter: Jonny @JACoates, Emma @ELWilson92, John @JohnDHoward8) and generously supported by ASAPbio (https://asapbio.org | @asapbio_).