Vessel Support
What is the first thing you notice in this image? It is probably the wild network of purple branches. Those are blood vessels emanating from a mouse’s spinal cord. You may also see sprinkles of green amid the purple. Those are pericytes – cells that help form and maintain the smallest blood vessels, making them just as important as the bigger vessels to spinal cord health.
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What is the first thing you notice in this image? It is probably the wild network of purple branches. Those are blood vessels emanating from a mouse’s spinal cord. You may also see sprinkles of green amid the purple. Those are pericytes – cells that help form and maintain the smallest blood vessels, making them just as important as the bigger vessels to spinal cord health.
What am I looking at?
This is an image of the blood vessels and pericytes in the spinal cord of a mouse. The blood vessels are shown in purple (1) and the pericytes in green (2).
Biology in the background
Blood vessels provide nutrients and oxygen to cells, remove cellular waste products, enable communication between organs through the endocrine system, bolster the immune system, and more.
However, blood vessels need support to accomplish all these essential tasks. This is especially true of the smaller and more fragile blood vessels known as capillaries. The walls of capillaries are so thin that nutrients can pass through them to surrounding cells. There are specialized cells called pericytes that live on capillaries’ thin walls. Pericytes help guide the formation of capillaries as they grow, support the fragile vessels, and assist in the transfer of nutrients from the blood that flows through the capillaries into the surrounding cells and tissues.
Pericytes are relatively long cells, reaching about 70 micrometers in length, or roughly the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using confocal microscopy and tissue clearing.
Andrea Tedeschi, Ohio State University Medical Center