Microchimerism

Systemic Microchimerism

Microchimerism: fears and hopes.

For those who are not used yet to this rather recent concept, microchimerism refers to the presence of very low numbers of allogeneic cells in an individual. Most interest in this phenomenon has been raised after the demonstration by the group of Diana Bianchi, a researcher working previously on prenatal diagnosis, that fetal cells – present in the peripheral blood of women during pregnancy – m...

Microchimerism in Sjögren's syndrome.

he advent of molecular biology techniques has led to the recognition that cells travel in both directions between mother and fetus. Fetal stem cells traverse the placenta and may persist in the maternal circulation for decades. Similarly, maternal cells may pass into the fetal circulation and persist into adult life. 1 The persistence of genetically different cells in the same person has been c...

Microchimerism: inaccurate literature citations.

Recent evidence suggests that the leukocytes (including stem cells) contained in organs migrate after transplantation and produce persistent chimerism, which is essential for sustained survival of the allografts (1, 2). With this information, we proposed as an encompassing principle that success after either clinical bone marrow or organ transplantation "(whether described as) tolerance or graf...

Microchimerism: covert genetics?

While the world of genetics has been dominated over the last decade by technological advances allowing the identification of common variants underlying the major complex diseases, it is increasingly clear that other genetic mechanisms are also involved in genetic susceptibility and resistance to disease. One understudied contender is microchimerism (maternal and foetal), resulting from bi-direc...