smooth muscle
Snapshots of Life: Picturing the Developing Windpipe
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Randee Young and Xin Sun, University of Wisconsin–Madison
The image above shows a small section of the trachea, or windpipe, of a developing mouse. Although it’s only about the diameter of a pinhead at this stage of development, the mouse trachea has a lot in common structurally with the much wider and longer human trachea. Both develop from a precisely engineered balance between the flexibility of smooth muscle and the supportive strength and durability of cartilage.
Here you can catch a glimpse of this balance. C-rings of cartilage (red) wrap around the back of the trachea, providing the support needed to keep its tube open during breathing. Attached to the ends of the rings are dark shadowy bands of smooth muscles, which are connected to a web of nerves (green). The tension supplied by the muscle cells is essential for proper development of those neatly organized cartilage rings.
Imaging Advance Offers New View on Allergic Asthma
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: OR-OCT images of the airways of a healthy person (left) and a person with allergic asthma (right). The colorized portion highlights airway smooth muscle, with thinner areas in purple and black and thicker areas in yellow and orange. Credit: Cho et al., Science Translational Medicine (2016)
You probably know people who sneeze a little when they encounter plant pollens, pet dander, or other everyday allergens. For others, however, these same allergens can trigger a serious asthma attack that can make breathing a life-or-death struggle. Now, two NIH-funded research groups have teamed up to help explain the differences in severity underlying the two types of reactions.
In the studies, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, used an innovative imaging tool to zoom in on a person’s airways safely in real time to gain an unprecedented view of how his or her body reacts to allergens [1,2]. The imaging revealed key differences between the asthma and non-asthma groups in the smooth muscle tissue that surrounds critical airways, and is responsible for constriction. In a complementary series of experiments, researchers also uncovered heightened immune responses in the airways of folks with allergic asthma. The findings offer important new clues in the quest to better understand and guide treatment for asthma, a condition that affects more than 300 million people around the world.
The factors driving airway constriction in people with asthma have been poorly understood in part because, until now, there hasn’t been a way to view airway smooth muscle in action. As described in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Melissa Suter and colleagues adapted an established form of imaging called optical coherence tomography (OCT) to help fill this gap. Standard OCT produces an image by measuring the amount of light reflected back from body tissues, but such images aren’t sufficient to distinguish airway smooth muscle from other tissues.
