Estimating the number of tissue resident macrophages

Abstract

I provide a simple estimation for the number of macrophages in a tissue, arising from the hypothesis that they should keep infections below a certain threshold, above which neutrophils are recruited from blood circulation. The estimation reads Nm=a Ncel^α/Nmax, where a is a numerical coefficient, the exponent α is near 2/3, and Nmax is the maximal number of pathogens a macrophage may engulf in the time interval, tr, between pathogen replications.