No Through Road

Just as a growing city builds new and bigger roads and eliminates some under-used streets, so a growing body builds and re-routes its blood vessels. The video shows the elimination of a small vessel connecting two larger ones in a zebrafish embryo. This process, called pruning, has rarely been observed, but thanks to advances in microscopy and the zebrafish embryo’s practically transparent body, scientists have now been able to capture the process at high-resolution in real-time. Pruning starts with the migration of cells within the doomed back-alley towards the larger thoroughfares at each end until one long, thin cell remains stretching across the divide. Finally, the connection is broken as the last cell incorporates into one of the larger vessels. By understanding how the body naturally shuts down such unwanted routes, researchers may be able to therapeutically mimic the process to prevent blood supply to tumours.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Video by Anna Lenard and colleagues
• Biozentrum der Universität Basel, Switzerland
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Biology, April 2015