Magnets for Modelling

Perinatal stroke affects one in every 5000 newborns. Perinatal arterial ischaemic stroke (PAIS) is the most common and is caused by a clump of red blood cells (RBCs), an embolus, blocking an artery in the brain. Modelling this in mice involves delivering an embolus directly into an artery, which is challenging in the small arteries of newborn mice. Researchers now present an alternative — Stroke Induced by Magnetic nanoParticLE-coated Red blood cells (SIMPLeR). Magnetic nanoparticles were attached to RBCs. Scanning electron microscopy reveals a normal RBC (left) and a magnetised one (right). In newborn mice containing magnetised RBCs, placing a magnet on their heads mimicked PAIS by reducing blood supply to brain tissue. Up to five days after PAIS, microbleeds occurred nine times more often in newborns than in adult mice treated in the same way. This mirrors what occurs in humans, supporting SIMPLeR as a useful model of PAIS.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image adapted from work by Yuxiao Jin and colleagues
• Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine, Hangzhou, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Communications Biology, February 2022