#capillaries

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Picking Out Pericytes

Identifying a unique specific marker of pericytes – cells that surround, support, communicate with and modulate blood capillaries – Higd1b enables subtypes of these cells and their roles to be distinguished in detail

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Timothy Klouda, Yunhye Kim and Seung-Han Baek, and colleagues

Division of Pulmonary Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Image contributed by the authors under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence

Published in The EMBO Journal, January 2025

Valvelike Openings -- form at the junction of adjacent endothelial cells -- endothelial cells loosely overlap -- overlapped cells separate to allow fluids to enter when fluid pressure increases outside -- when pressure increases inside the vessel, the cells tighten and hold the fluids inside

Anchoring Filaments -- attach the endothelial cells of the lymphatic vessels to surrounding collagen -- when interstitial fluid increases, anchoring filaments prevent endothelial cells from collapsing -- this keeps the endothelial cells open

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