Journal des maladies infectieuses et de la thérapie

Abstrait

The Ontogeny of Red Soma Cells

Song Huang

We reported recently our discovery of an important population of red cells in the lungs, distinct from the Red blood cells. They are permanent resident pulmonary cells located in the connective tissues of the lungs, with multiple differentiation potentials and diverse important functions. We named this population of cells, Red Soma Cells. In this article, we try to map out the ontogeny of the Red Soma Cells during mouse lung development. First, based on our knowledge on RSC cells in adult human lungs, we established an “Identikit” of RSC cells: a disk-like shape and pinkcolored after Eosin/Hematoxylin staining on histological sections. Then, with this “Identikit” in mind, we searched for RSC-like cells in the literature on mouse lung development. We found at least 7 lines of evidence, which permitted us to construct a Mind Map on the ontogeny of Red Soma Cells during mouse lung development. This Mind Map allowed us to explain a large amount of experimental data obtained in several different fields, with different analytical tools: Anatomy/Whole lungs, Histology/Lung sections and H/E staining, Genetics/transgenic mice, Gene expression analysis/Whole genome transcriptomes, Developmental Biology/septation and Ontogeny of lung macrophages, etc. Finally, we reached the following conclusion: the mouse Red Soma Cells, probably originated from fetal liver, constitute a unique cell population of Hematopoietic Stem Cells with important roles in mouse lung development.