Different Red Islands

In foetuses, white and red blood cells develop in the liver – the process of haematopoiesis – and at birth the bone marrow takes up the mantle. In both situations, red blood cells are nurtured to maturity in niches called erythroblastic islands where they lose their nuclei to maximise oxygen-carrying capacity (mature red cells and platelets are the only cells of the body without a nucleus). Here, mapping the gene activity of these islands in mouse and human foetal liver and bone marrow reveals a different make-up in each species - in mice, macrophages (large white cells of the immune system) play a key role, but not in humans which depend on the adhesion molecule ICAM4

Read the published research article here

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Image from work by Xu Han & Kehan Ren, and colleagues
• Department of Pathology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Genetics, July 2026