A study reporting high-quality placenta transcriptome based on the POPS study is published in Nature Communications. The placenta is understudied and is commonly omitted from large-scale “-omic” analyses such as the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. This study enables tissue-wide comparison of transcriptome analyses, as well as identification of dysregulated transcripts in placentally-related adverse pregnancy outcomes […]

Evgeniya (Zhenya) Shmeleva and Francesco Colucci sum up the knowns of natural killer cells and infections during pregnancy in their paper published today in the Mucosal Immunology journal – the official publication of the Society for Mucosal Immunology. Shmeleva EV, Colucci F. Maternal natural killer cells at the intersection between reproduction and mucosal immunity. Mucosal […]

A study led by Ulla Sovio and Gordon Smith at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, identified new biomarkers predictive of early term spontaneous labour. The team performed a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Outcome Prediction study. They found that slowing of fetal growth velocity detected […]

The uterus of mammalian species (including humans and model organisms such as mice) contains many immune cells that are critical for a successful pregnancy. In a new paper published in the journal Immunity, Norman Shreeve and colleagues from Francesco Colucci’s group at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, together with their collaborators, studied the role […]

Congratulations to Professors Gordon Smith and Steve Charnock-Jones on the publication of their paper in Nature. The study is the first high-resolution survey of the genomic architecture of the human placenta, revealing specific patterns of mutation that are commonly found in childhood cancers In the first study of the genomic architecture of the human placenta, […]