BACKGROUND Lymphatic vessels play a pivotal role in fluid drainage and egress of immune cells from the lung. However, examining murine lung lymphatics is hampered by the expression of classical lymph endothelial markers on other cell types, which hinders the unambiguous identification of lymphatics. The expression of CD90/Thy-1 on lymph endothelium was recently described and we therefore examin...

Computed tomography (CT) of the reticulum, rumen and omasum was carried out in 30 healthy goats and the images were compared to corresponding body sections obtained at postmortem. A multidetector CT was used to examine goats in sternal recumbency. A setting of 120 KV and 270 mA was used to produce 1.5-mm transverse slices from the fifth thoracic vertebra to the sacrum. Soft tissue structures we...

Precision-cut lung slices (PCLS) allow comparison of airway responses of different species under identical experimental conditions. Our aim was to establish and characterize PCLS from guinea pigs (GP) and to compare them to human PCLS. Guinea pig PCLS were prepared according to previously published procedures with the exception that the agarose solution and the initial incubation medium contain...

Chronic liver injury of various etiologies can cause liver fibrosis, which is characterized by the progressive accumulation of connective tissue in the liver. As no effective treatment for liver fibrosis is available yet, extensive research is ongoing to further study the mechanisms underlying the development of disease- or toxicity-induced liver fibrosis and to identify potential pro- or anti-...

Precision-cut lung slices (PCLS) are an established ex vivo alternative to in vivo experiments in pharmacotoxicology. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential of PCLS as a tool in nanotoxicology studies. Silver (Ag-NPs) and zinc oxide (ZnO-NPs) nanoparticles as well as quartz particles were used because these materials have been previously shown in several in vitro and in vivo studie...

O. Danov1, S. M. Jiménez Delgado1, H. Drake1, S. Seehase2, A. M. Hohlbaum3, C. Bersch4, D. Jonigk5, G. Warnecke6, A. Braun1 and K. Sewald1 1Airway Immunology, Fraunhofer Institute for toxicology and experimental Medicine, Biomedical Research in endstage and Obstructive lung Disease Hannover (BReAtH), Member of the German Centre for lung Research (DZl), Hannover, Germany; 2Clinical & experimenta...

BACKGROUND Animal models should display important characteristics of the human disease. Sheep have been considered particularly useful to study allergic airway responses to common natural antigens causing human asthma. A rationale of this study was to establish a model of ovine precision-cut lung slices (PCLS) for the in vitro measurement of airway responses in newborn and adult animals. We hyp...