Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2007 Oct 1;204(10):2349–2362. doi: 10.1084/jem.20062596

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

Copyright © 2007, The Rockefeller University Press

This article is distributed under the terms of an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike–No Mirror Sites license for the first six months after the publication date (see http://www.rupress.org/terms). After six months it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported license, as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

PMC Copyright notice

Figure 1. — Buttons in endothelium of initial lymphatics. (A) Confocal images showing lymphatic vessels (green, LYVE-1) and blood vessels (red, PECAM-1) in whole mount of mouse trachea. Region of mucosa over horizontal cartilage (*) is mostly free of lymphatics. (B) Longitudinal section of trachea shows epithelium (green), subepithelial blood vessels (red, arrowheads), more deeply positioned initial lymphatics (diagonal arrows), collecting lymphatic (horizontal arrow), and adjacent cartilages. (C and D) Confocal images of VE-cadherin immunoreactivity (red) at discontinuous buttons in initial lymphatic (arrows; C) and continuous zippers in collecting lymphatic (D). Zippers are also present in blood capillary (arrowheads; C). Lymphatics are identified by Prox1 (green) in nuclei. (E) Distribution of 3,110 buttons along the length of 25 lymphatics in five tracheas, expressed as a function of distance from the tip. Values are presented as means ± SEM. *, P < 0.05 compared with the number at the tip (0 μm). (F and G) Confocal images showing VE-cadherin at buttons (arrows) and LYVE-1 between buttons (arrowhead) at the border of oak leaf–shaped endothelial cells of initial lymphatic. (G) Enlarged isosurface rendering of confocal image stack of boxed region in F. (H) Scanning electron microscopic image showing external surface of overlapping flaps at the junction of three endothelial cells of initial lymphatic. (I) Drawing of boxed region in H showing contributions of three endothelial cells. Bars: (A and B) 100 μm; (C, D, and F) 10 μm; (G) 5 μm; (H) 1 μm.