Researcher discovers previously rejected function in the brain’s blood vessels

Researcher discovers previously rejected function in the brain's blood vessels
Close-up of precapillary sphincter (the strong red mark in the middle of the greenly marked blood flow) from two-photon microscope. According to the research results, these squeezing muscle cells are in the brain most often found at the early branches of blood vessels in the upper layers of the cerebral cortex. Credit: University of Copenhagen

Allegedly, they should not exist in the brain, the so-called precapillary sphincters—a kind of squeezing ‘muscle clamp’ between the larger and smaller vessels of the bloodstream.

Nevertheless, Assistant Professor Søren Grubb from the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen has indeed shown the sphincters in mice.

“In the early ’10s, a…

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