Follow the Crowd

From protest marches to football matches, when it comes to crowd control police officers line the streets where the greatest throngs of people pass. It's all about reacting to the flow of the crowd. The same is true of cells lining developing blood vessels. As networks of vessels develop, some vessels are dismantled while others are reinforced. This is led by the migration of the cells that line them. To find out what drives this, researchers looked to developing blood vessels in the mouse eye. High-resolution imaging uncovered which vessels were being dismantled (blue). A computer program then estimated the blood flow through all the vessels imaged. High blood flow matched stable vessels, while low blood flow matched dismantling vessels. A closer look revealed cells were drawn towards high blood flow regions. As with officers reining in a marching crowd, these cells head to where they are needed most.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Claudio A. Franco and colleagues
• Carried out at what was the Vascular Biology Laboratory, at the London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, April 2015