Down the Tubes

Your body contains thousands of miles of blood vessels, most of them tiny capillaries just fractions of a millimetre in diameter, which have to be kept in tip-top conditions in order to keep the red stuff flowing properly. The job of building and maintaining blood vessels falls to endothelial cells, shown here growing in circular patterns in plastic dishes in the lab. These specialised cells are normally found lining the blood vessels, where they’re controlled by a chemical signal known as BMP. The cells on the left are healthy and form a tidy layer, similar to the way they would grow in a normal blood vessel. But the disrupted cells on the right have been genetically engineered so they no longer respond to BMP signals. This discovery helps to explain why people with similar genetic changes have cardiovascular problems such as abnormally high blood pressure or leaky, malformed blood vessels.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Christian Hiepen and Jerome Jatzlau, and colleagues
• Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Chemistry and Biochemistry, Berlin, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, December 2019