Microchimerism–Carl Zimmer commentary recent papers

Carl Zimmer provides fine NYTimes coverage of a recent BioEssays paper by Boddy, Wilson-Sayres, Fortuno,  and Aktipis, titled “Fetal microchimerism and maternal health: A review and evolutionary analysis of cooperation and conflict beyond the womb” The paper is open access.

“A Pregnancy Souvenir: Cells That Are Not Your Own”  by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times
Recently, a team of pathologists at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands carried out an experiment that might seem doomed to failure.

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They collected tissue from 26 women who had died during or just after pregnancy. All of them had been carrying sons. The pathologists then stained the samples to check for Y chromosomes. lasix 20mg

Essentially, the scientists were looking for male cells in female bodies. And their search was stunningly successful.

As reported last month in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction Clomid 50mg, the researchers found cells with Y-chromosomes in every tissue sample they examined. These male cells were certainly uncommon — at their most abundant, they only made up about 1 in every 1,000 cells. But male cells were present in every organ that the scientists studied: brains, hearts, kidneys and others.  read the full article