Congratulations to Minxue Jia for the acceptance of his first author Respiratory Research paper, which is entitled “Early events marking lung fibroblast transition to profibrotic state in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis”. In this paper, Minxue analyzed two publicly available scRNA-seq data from IPF patients and controls focusing on the transition of fibroblasts from normal to pro-fibrotic state. Major findings of the paper are: (1) there are extensive gene expression changes in ribosomal protein and copper-binding genes during the fibroblasts’ transition; (2) molecular changes in fibroblasts are likely to precede physiological tissue changes (there was not much gene expression changes between fibrotic areas of lower lobes and non-fibrotic upper lobe); (3) MOXD1, a copper-binding protein, is an important fibroblast-specific early marker of fibrosis.
Paper availability: [journal web site] [bioRxiv]
Congratulations to Minxue and thanks to all collaborators for their contributions!