Plugging a Leak

In your house, some pipes bring in clean water, and a separate system removes the waste. In your body, veins and arteries ferry your blood around, and another network, lymph vessels, transport waste as well as important immune cells. During some bacterial infections and genetic conditions, these vessels can problematically leak, so researchers are investigating what maintains their integrity. A protein called EphrinB2 interacts with a counterpart receptor, EphB4, which sits in the membrane of the cells lining the vessels. When these two meet, the junctions that link these outer cells change, and when researchers blocked the conversation, leaks resulted. Without the constant crosstalk, the very internal structure of these essential lining cells changes, resulting in leaks at the junctions between cells (purple, surrounded by green fibres). Treatments that restart this conversation could be the key to plugging the leaks.

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 from work by Maike Frye and colleagues
• Uppsala University, Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Uppsala, Sweden
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, September 2020