Leak Less

It’s no good repairing a broken plumbing system with new pipes that leak themselves. Something like this happens when researchers investigating the mechanism behind struggling lymphatic systems – the network of microscopic pipes that drain and transport essential material in the body – add the growth-inducing molecule VEGF-C to prompt new vessel growth. As an alternative to this active encouragement, a new approach instead removed the innate brakes downstream in the regulation process. The study examined mice engineered to lack a particular protein, PTEN, in the cells lining their vessels, which freed a different key receptor for VEGF-C to step up its action. The result was an expanded network of lymphatic vessels that was less leaky and functioned better. The vessels (green in the mouse intestinal tissue shown) were long-lasting, suggesting this approach may be a better way to enhance the network.

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 Raghu P. Kataru and colleagues, on the cover of Science Signaling, 10 August 2021
• Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS
• Published in Science Signaling, August 2021