Blood shear stress during the cardiac cycle and endothelial cell orientation and polarity in the carotid artery of male and female mice.

Blood flow produces fluid shear stress (SS), a frictional force parallel to the blood flow, on the endothelial cell (EC) layer of the lumen of the vessels. ECs themselves are sensitive to this frictional force in terms of directionality and intensity. The aim of this study was to determine the physiological shear stress value during the cardiac cycle and EC polarity and orientation from blood flow in healthy male and female mouse carotid artery.

Factor H's Control of Complement Activation Emerges as a Significant and Promising Therapeutic Target for Alzheimer's Disease Treatment.

The complement is a component of the innate immune system designed to fight infections and tissue- or age-related damages. Complement activation creates an inflammatory microenvironment, which enhances cell death. Excessive complement inflammatory activity has been linked to alterations in the structure and functions of the blood-brain barrier, contributing to a poor prognosis for Alzheimer's disease (AD).

3D imaging and morphometric descriptors of vascular networks on optically cleared organs.

The vascular system is a multi-scale network whose functionality depends on its structure, and for which structural alterations can be linked to pathological shifts. Though biologists use multiple 3D imaging techniques to visualize vascular networks, the 3D image processing methodologies remain sources of biases, and the extraction of quantitative morphometric descriptors remains flawed. The article, first, reviews the current 3D image processing methodologies, and morphometric descriptors of vascular network images mainly obtained by light-sheet microscopy on optically cleared organs, found in the literature.

Computational Identification and 3D Morphological Characterization of Renal Glomeruli in Optically Cleared Murine Kidneys.

The aim of this study was to establish an accessible methodology for the objective identification and 3D morphological characterization of renal glomeruli in mice. 3D imaging of the renal cortex was performed by light sheet microscopy on iDISCO+ optical cleared kidneys of six C57BL/6J mice after labelling of the capillary endothelium by lectin injection. 3D images were processed with the open source software ImageJ, and statistical analysis done with GraphPad Prism.

3D Imaging and Quantitative Characterization of Mouse Capillary Coronary Network Architecture.

Characterization of the cardiac capillary network structure is of critical importance to understand the normal coronary functional properties and coronary microvascular diseases. The aim of our study was to establish an accessible methodology for 3D imaging and 3D processing to quantitatively characterize the capillary coronary network architecture in mice. Experiments were done on C57BL/6J mice.