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Blood-vessel formation

Bridges that guide and unite

Nature volume 465, pages 697–699 (2010)Cite this article

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To form new blood vessels, the endothelial tip cells of two existing vessels come together by the process of anastomosis. But how do they find each other? Macrophages seem to provide a bridge and mediate their union.

Many primitive organisms lack blood vessels, and oxygen simply diffuses to their innermost cells. Blood vessels arose in evolution when organisms outgrew the physical limits of oxygen diffusion. They are lined with endothelial cells and branch by sprouting — sending out specialized endothelial cells called tip cells at the forefront of the sprout that navigate to their target1. Previous studies have mainly focused on understanding how tip cells initiate vessel sprouting; so nearly nothing is known about how these cells fuse with neighbouring sprouts to form a perfused vessel. Writing in Blood, Fantin et al.2 report that, contrary to expectation, tip cells lack the precision to find, recognize and fuse with other tip cells. Instead, macrophages, phagocytic cells of the immune system, serve both as what we would like to call 'bridge cells' and as guidance posts to precisely position tip cells in preparation for accurate fusion.

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Figure 1: Bridging branch formation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thomas Schmidt and Peter Carmeliet are at the Vesalius Research Center, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Leuven, B-3000, Belgium. peter.carmeliet@vib-kuleuven.be ,

    Thomas Schmidt & Peter Carmeliet

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  1. Thomas Schmidt
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  2. Peter Carmeliet
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Schmidt, T., Carmeliet, P. Bridges that guide and unite. Nature 465, 697–699 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/465697a

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