EEB Graduate Student Arun Chavan’s talk featured in Science & Nature!

January 13, 2018

The key to a successful pregnancy: a tamed immune reaction - Arun Chavan presents at SICB In work reported last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Yale University team led by evolutionary developmental biologist Gunter Wagner found that so-called placental mammals have tweaked an ancient inflammatory process to enable embryos to implant and persist in the womb. Placental mammals—named for the mass of tissue in the uterus that serves as the interface between mother and fetus—have specialized uterine cells that suppress the release of a key immune-stimulating molecule. This suppression may help delay the rejection of the embryo until it’s fully mature, Arun Chavan, a Yale graduate student in Wagner’s lab in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department presented at the meeting. See the full articles at Science and Nature.