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Elvira Mass
© Silvia Hoch
Prof. Dr. Elvira Mass

Website

Affiliations
  • Life & Medical Sciences Institute (LIMES)
Research topics
  • macrophages
  • developmental biology
  • immunology
Our research focus is on the developmental biology of the innate immune system. We are particularly interested in the role of macrophages in organ development and function during health and disease. Albeit macrophages have been repeatedly shown to contribute to organogenesis and react to tissue damage, their causative role in metabolic disorders and neurodegenerative diseases remains to be investigated. Besides the role of the immune responses in adult mice, we examine the consequences of environmental influences during pregnancy which are transmitted from the mother to the developing fetus, e.g. fatty acids during maternal obesity or plastic particles which the mother ingests through eating and drinking and which pass from the maternal into the fetal blood. Our ultimate goal is to understand the mechanisms that lead to the long-term change of macrophages and their dysfunction in order to counteract them early in development.
Selected publications

Werner, Y., Mass, E., Ashok Kumar, P., Ulas, T., Händler, K., Horne, A., Klee, K., Lupp, A., Schütz, D., Saaber, F., Redecker, C., Schultze, J.L., Geissmann, F., & Stumm, R. (2020) Cxcr4 distinguishes HSC-derived monocytes from microglia and reveals monocyte immune responses to experimental stroke. Nat. Neurosci., 23, 351–362.

Jacome-Galarza, C.E., Percin, G.I., Muller, J.T., Mass, E., Lazarov, T., Eitler, J., Rauner, M., Yadav, V.K., Crozet, L., Bohm, M., Loyher, P.-L., Karsenty, G., Waskow, C., & Geissmann, F. (2019) Developmental origin, functional maintenance and genetic rescue of osteoclasts. Nature, 568, 541–545.

Mass, E., Jacome-Galarza, C.E., Blank, T., Lazarov, T., Durham, B.H., Ozkaya, N., Pastore, A., Schwabenland, M., Chung, Y.R., Rosenblum, M.K., Prinz, M., Abdel-Wahab, O., & Geissmann, F. (2017) A somatic mutation in erythro-myeloid progenitors causes neurodegenerative disease. Nature, 549, 389–393.

Mass, E., Ballesteros, I., Farlik, M., Halbritter, F., Günther, P., Crozet, L., Jacome-Galarza, C.E., Händler, K., Klughammer, J., Kobayashi, Y., Gomez-Perdiguero, E., Schultze, J.L., Beyer, M., Bock, C., & Geissmann, F. (2016) Specification of tissue-resident macrophages during organogenesis. Science, 353, aaf4238.

Elvira Mass
© Silvia Hoch
Prof. Dr. Elvira Mass

Website

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