Liver Central
This dark chasm looks like a hole in the center of a brightly colored tapestry, but it’s actually a central vein in the liver of a mouse. The liver is like a very efficient sewage treatment plant for the body; it’s where toxic substances are removed and useful ones are recycled. Blood from the rest of the body passes through this vein to be processed by the liver cells that surround the vein.
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DownloadLiver Central
This dark chasm looks like a hole in the center of a brightly colored tapestry, but it’s actually a central vein in the liver of a mouse. The liver is like a very efficient sewage treatment plant for the body; it’s where toxic substances are removed and useful ones are recycled. Blood from the rest of the body passes through this vein to be processed by the liver cells that surround the vein.
What am I looking at?
The image shows mouse liver cells – with their nuclei labeled in blue (1) – radiating like spokes of a wheel out from the central vein (2). The pink and purple sections of this image are the cell membranes of the liver cells (3). The yellow is sialic acid (4), an amino acid that helps remove toxins and pathogens from the blood.
Biology in the background
In vertebrates like mice and humans, the liver has many important functions, particularly the removal of harmful substances from the blood. The black circle you see in the middle of this image is one of many structures called central veins; they are located in liver lobules, large functional units within the liver. Here, you can see that liver cells (in blue) are more densely packed around the central vein and get less concentrated farther away from the vein.
This arrangement helps the liver efficiently remove toxins from the blood as it passes through the central vein for filtration. Once it’s processed, the blood is returned to circulation. All the blood that leaves the veins of the stomach and intestines must pass through a central vein.
In a mouse, this vein is about 375 micrometers across, or roughly five times the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using fluorescence microscopy.
Amy Engevik, Medical University of South Carolina