SUNny Sprouts

Your blood vessels are a superhighway delivering vital nutrients throughout your body. You don’t want them to unexpectedly leak. And that's why endothelial cells lining the inside of your blood vessels tightly control the barrier between these vessels and the surrounding tissue through junctions linking one cell to the next. The command centre (nucleus) of an endothelial cell controls everything the cell does, including controlling its cell-cell junctions. Researchers now investigate how, focusing on SUN1, a protein that helps link nuclei to cells’ scaffolding (cytoskeleton). Fluorescence microscopy of human endothelial cells genetically manipulated to lack SUN1 (pictured, right) and normal endothelial cells (left) revealed that SUN1 is needed for vessels to sprout, as well as for the proper formation and function of cell-cell junctions. Further experiments in mice and zebrafish with faulty SUN1 revealed SUN1 stabilised cell-cell junctions by controlling the activity of microtubules that form part of the cell cytoskeleton.

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 Danielle B Buglak and colleagues
• Curriculum in Cell Biology and Physiology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, March 2023