Smita Patil: New Insights Into Platelet Alpha-Granule Secretion
Smita Patil, Postdoctoral Researcher at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, shared Ingmar Schön’s post on LinkedIn, adding:
”Delighted that this labour of love is finally out in the world. The work spanned several years, numerous experiments, and some significant life changes along the way, so its wonderful to share it.
In our new work, Super-resolution mapping of platelet α-granules uncovers non-polarized secretion and differential retention of von Willebrand factor and thrombospondin-1, we used STED and dSTORM microscopy to investigate how platelet α-granule cargo is organized and released at the nanoscale.
A special thank you to Ingmar Schön for his mentorship, support, and scientific guidance throughout this project. I am also incredibly grateful to my co-authors and collaborators for their contributions and many insightful discussions. Looking forward to hearing what the platelet and vascular biology community thinks.”
Ingmar Schön, Senior Lecturer at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, shared on LinkedIn about a recent article he and his colleagues co-authored, published in bioRxiv, adding:
”The latest study from our lab has been published as a preprint on bioRxiv!
This study has been a mere vision when I started my own lab at RCSI in Ireland, but with the expert help from Jonas Ries, Joran
Deschamps, Massimiliano Garre’, financial support from Research Ireland and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and first and foremost the hard work from a very talented postdoc, Smita Patil, PhD, it has finally become a reality. We are very proud to share this story with you and look forward to its peer-review.
Smita took a VERY close look at platelet alpha granules and their secretion during platelet spreading using state-of-the-art superresolution microscopy methods – in more than 7,000 single human platelets! She demonstrated that
- granule components occupy distinct subcompartments within individual granules
- granule secretion occurs exclusively from the cell body and without directional preference
- the fate of secreted cargos differs greatly: While thrombospondin-1 (TSP1) accumulated within diffusion-restricted microenvironments beneath platelets and rebound to the surrounding matrix, von Willebrand factor (VWF) remained predominantly tethered to platelet membranes and formed extended membrane-associated strings.
These findings demonstrate that the biological impact of platelet α-granule secretion is determined not only by which cargo is released at what time point, but also by how that cargo is spatially retained after secretion, thereby shaping local concentration gradients that might influence platelet signalling, cell recruitment, and thrombus development.”
Title: Super-resolution mapping of platelet α-granules uncovers non-polarized secretion and differential retention of von Willebrand Factor and thrombospondin-1
Authors: Smita Patil, Joran Deschamps, Massimiliano Garre, Shreya Sankar, Jonas Ries, Ingmar Schoen
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