Can Airway Monocytes from Premature Infants Teach Us about Macrophage Differentiation in the Lungs?

Prigge and Coates discuss the paper by Welfley et al which describes airway immune cells obtained during this premature transition. Using a routine clinical intervention called tracheal aspiration, cells were collected within 1-hour of birth from the airways of 10 extremely premature neonates who required an endotracheal tube for respiratory failure. The cells were cryopreserved for subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing. After filtering for quality, a total of 6,803-cells were sequenced.