When infection or injury occurs, neutrophils—our most abundant immune cells—are the first to arrive. Long considered short-lived foot soldiers of the immune system, they are essential for host defense yet notorious for exacerbating inflammation in conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to COVID-19. Despite their ubiquity, scientists have struggled to understand how neutrophils function across tissues and disease states. Their substantial heterogeneity has been documented, but the lack of a unifying framework has limited translation into clinical insight. That gap has now been addressed. An international consortium led by researchers at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Yale University, and Westlake University in China has created NeuMap, the first comprehensive atlas of neutrophils. The study published this week in Nature under the title “Architecture of the neutrophil compartment” analyzed more than one million cells using single-cell transcriptional profiling to chart how neutrophils are organized across tissues, developmental stages, and disease conditions in mice. “What is most surprising,” explained Ivan Ballesteros, PhD, professor at UC3M and researcher at CNIC, “is that individual neutrophils live only a few hours, yet this cell population maintains a stable architecture throughout life. It is a pattern that emerges from chaos. Understanding this logic opens new avenues to guide immunity toward healing.” NeuMap integrates data from 47 biological conditions, revealing that neutrophils organize into a finite number of functional hubs. These hubs represent distinct states: proliferative precursors, interferon-responsive cells, immunosuppressive subsets, and a silent circulating population. Computational modeling and timestamp…
