Blog

Today, a team led by researchers from the Broad and Brigham and Women’s Hospital published a paper about the elaborate circuitry that directs blood cell specialization. Every day, 200 billion newly minted blood cells are produced from a small cache of stem cells in the bone marrow – the soft material in the center of most bones. Different kinds of white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets each emerge from a unique program that controls their maturation.

This weekend, several Broad researchers will be in sunny San Diego (those of us in snowy Cambridge are a bit jealous…) presenting at the annual Plant and Animal Genome Conference. I caught up with a few researchers before they left to find out more about what they’ll be presenting.

Ferrets sneeze – just like we do. The way that ferrets shed viruses from their lungs is very similar to the way that humans do, which makes them a great model for studying respiratory illnesses like pneumonia, SARS, cystic fibrosis, and the flu. Researchers also use ferrets to study lung cancer, brain development, and reproductive biology. But until now, the ferret’s genome has remained a mystery.

As a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard Medical School investigator (and Broad Associate Member) Norbert Perrimon's lab, Serena Silver loved talking to her fellow post-docs about their projects and liked to help them come up with new ideas to try. Now, as Group Leader of RNAi Screening Projects at the Broad, Serena gets to talk to researchers about their projects for a living.