Network Development

Picture a network of train lines sprawling across a country, reaching for every corner. At first glance it might look a little chaotic, but it’s actually carefully planned to make best use of the available space. Inside our lungs a similar ordered chaos is laid down when we develop in our mother’s womb: a dense, precise network of tubes and compartments (pictured in a 10 week-old human foetus) designed to draw essential oxygen from the air we breathe. Any errors in this branching pattern can spell disaster, such as pulmonary hypoplasia, a serious condition that can be fatal for young people. To understand how the body builds the branching network, a study disabled a protein called Rac1, which was thought to control the signals that steer proper network development. Without it, signal failure prevented the lung’s branching structure forming, confirming an important detail in the biology of their creation.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image courtesy of Denise Al Alam, PhD, and Esteban Fernandez, PhD, The Saban Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
• Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in the American Journal of Physiology, October 2016