{"id":25323,"date":"2016-05-03T20:32:36","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T03:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/watch-immune-cells-glue-broken-blood-vessels-back-together"},"modified":"2016-05-03T20:32:36","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T03:32:36","slug":"watch-immune-cells-glue-broken-blood-vessels-back-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/watch-immune-cells-glue-broken-blood-vessels-back-together","title":{"rendered":"Watch immune cells \u2018glue\u2019 broken blood vessels back together"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Very cool!<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>As we age, tiny blood vessels in the brain stiffen and sometimes rupture, causing \u201cmicrobleeds.\u201d This damage has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline, but whether the brain can naturally repair itself beyond growing new blood-vessel tissue has been unknown. A zebrafish study published on May 3 in <em>Immunity<\/em> describes for the first time how white blood cells called macrophages can grab the broken ends of a blood vessel and stick them back together.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMicrobleeding occurs very often in the human brain, particularly in elderly people,\u201d says Lingfei Luo, a developmental geneticist at Southwest University in China. \u201cWe believe that this macrophage behavior is the major cellular mechanism to repair ruptures of blood vessels and avoid microbleeding in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To simulate a human brain microbleed, Luo and his colleagues shot lasers into the brains of live zebrafish to rupture small blood vessels, creating a clean split in the tissue with two broken ends. Then, the researchers used a specialized microscope to watch what happened next.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2016\/05\/160503130340.htm\">https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2016\/05\/160503130340.htm<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Very cool! As we age, tiny blood vessels in the brain stiffen and sometimes rupture, causing \u201cmicrobleeds.\u201d This damage has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline, but whether the brain can naturally repair itself beyond growing new blood-vessel tissue has been unknown. A zebrafish study published on May 3 in Immunity describes for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}