Breaking Barriers

Like a red rope keeps the flow of visitors and their sticky fingers away from precious artwork, the blood-brain-barrier protects the vulnerable brain from potential pollution from substances circulating in the blood. Damage to this barrier is linked to many diseases, and the barrier itself can prevent treatments reaching the brain. To investigate its permeability and structure researchers have created a new replica of the system, combining all the cellular elements of the real thing with an elegantly simple see-saw setup that mimics the constant natural flow of blood past the surfaces. They then observed the impacts of low oxygen and glucose, a hallmark of stroke, and saw rapid changes in actin structures (red, clumping in the video during an hour of oxygen deprivation, indicated in green), and changes in electrical resistance. This platform is easily replicated, so will help investigations that may lead to better treatments for brain conditions like tumours.

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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• Video from work by Wei Wei and colleagues
• ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Bio Engineering Laboratory, Basel, Switzerland
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Science, February 2023