Capillaries do all their work in bed – they’re not lazy, but they’re leaky!

Posted on by leif

Capillaries leaking in bed

Our tiny capillaries are the most important blood vessels in the body, responsible for supplying virtually all the oxygen and nutrients that our organs depend on.  So how do they behave, under the immense burden of this great responsibility?  They never even climb out of bed!

A capillary bed is the name for a group of capillaries that all receive blood from the same source.  The source vessel is called a metarteriole, and from there, a branching network of capillaries originates.  The large number of branches provides a huge surface area across which diffusion can rapidly deliver the materials demanded by the surrounding tissues.

But there’s something else going on in most capillary beds – they’re leaky.  But don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal!  There are holes in the capillary walls, allowing the fluid component of blood (plasma) to leak out, and this is how the body’s interstitial fluid is produced.  The bulk flow of fluid across the capillary wall, back and forth between the blood and surrounding tissues, permits more rapid exchange than diffusion alone can provide.

Capillary leakiness varies greatly from one organ to the next, depending on the need for exchange.  The liver is the “water purification plant” of the body, and requires tremendous amounts of exchange to do its job – it therefore has among the leakiest capillaries.  At the other extreme, the brain is like a “cleanroom” where contaminants are excluded to prevent “misfires” of the delicate neural machinery – so its capillaries are almost watertight (the blood-brain barrier).

Given that most capillaries are leaky, what happens to all that water?  Does the bedroom flood completely, until a plumber is called to the scene?  Well, not quite.  The answer to this problem is the lymphatic system – it’s the storm drain of the body, which collects all the excess interstitial fluid of the body, and carries it right back to the blood…to be leaked out, all over again, by our hard-working capillaries.

Lymph nodes: Police stations of the body

Posted on by leif

Lymph node as a police stationA lymph node is a bit like a jungle gym for our microscopic police force.  A filter or dragnet, evolved to catch unsavory characters like bacteria and viruses — drifters who are up to no good.  Our hundreds of lymph nodes function like district police headquarters, situated around the body with concentrations in the armpits, neck and other areas.

Tissue fluids throughout the body make their way into the lymphatic vessels, carrying any infectious microbes along.  Lymph nodes like the one shown above are stationed along those vessels, and here is where the “crooks” meet a concentration of leukocytes, or white “blood” cells.  (I add quotes around “blood” because they spend most of their time patrolling through other body tissues.  It’s a bit like calling someone a “streetwalker” just because you caught them crossing the street now and then.)

The “jungle gym” in a lymph node is built of reticular connective tissue, specially evolved to provide “networking” opportunities (“reticular” means “net-like”).  This facilitates interaction among the cops while also giving them a good chance of nabbing a microbe.  Some leukocytes may respond immediately (cop reaching for gun), and will later serve as an antigen-presenting cell to communicate their findings to the others (the “wanted” slide shown at top).  After the initial encounter, certain leukocytes with a receptor for the specific microbe (“I was born for this assignment, boss!”) divide into many identical clones that are specifically on the lookout for said crook.  The production of clones is what produces the swollen lymph nodes during an illness.  Memory cells (the cop with the desk job) remain on high alert (perhaps with the help of coffee and a donut) even after the crooks have been executed, in case they show up again, when the body will be prepared for a more rapid response (adaptive immunity).  Some memory cells can live for decades – very old “cops” indeed — and they never forget.  Leukocytes communicate with a variety of signals (cops joking around at right), some of which encourage them to “bulk up” for the encounter, like the cop doing pull-ups.

We run into the larger lymph nodes (around 1-2 cm) with every dissection in the cadaver lab.  They’re nondescript, and firm, but with a dense, spongy texture that, with a touch of imagination, is suggestive of their “cop station” function.

Interstitial fluid: Our internal life aquatic

Posted on by leif

I would love to shrink down to microscopic size and greet the cells in my own body face-to-face, like something out of the movie Fantastic Voyage.  Of course, I won’t “hold my breath” waiting for such an opportunity to come along.  But even if there were some way to do this, I would quickly drown without SCUBA equipment!  This underscores the fact that our internal environment is an aquatic one.  Our living cells depend on the special properties of water, both to exchange gases, nutrients and wastes, and to facilitate the chemical reactions necessary for life.  Evolution has not yet found a way to allow life to thrive without internal water (a few creatures are capable of surviving complete desiccation, but they do so in suspended animation).

Indeed, a cell out of water is like a fish out of water.  This means that the dry skin surface of the human body is all dead tissue.  It also means that all our internal tissues are moist.  Even bone tissue, despite being largely composed of calcium phosphate, is permeated with water and houses living bone cells that live comfortably within tiny water-filled “lagoons” known as lacunae.

Some tissues contain more water than others.  Blood is the tissue with the greatest water content, but all other tissues have, between their cells, a fluid known as tissue fluid, or interstitial fluid.  The tissue depicted above might represent areolar connective tissue, a ubiquitous tissue found in many parts of the body, which contains a large amount of interstitial fluid. Because it’s found adjacent to all blood vessels, it plays an important “middleman” role allowing molecules to make their way between the blood and nearby tissues.  The two typical cells shown here would be fibroblasts, which produce the protein fibers giving structure to the tissue (collagen fibers are shown in gray, and reticular fibers in magenta); these in turn provide attachment points for the cells, as they go about living their aquatic lives. Unfortunately, the interstitial fluid is also a benign environment for bacteria (shown in pink) — but that’s a story for another day.