Table 1.

Parameters routinely quantified from the reconstruction shown in Fig. 2a

Numbers are mean ± standard deviation from livers of five male, adult C57 Bl6/N mice

* The three contact areas do not add up to 100 but only 99.4 % for experimental reasons, because the antibodies leave a small fraction (less than 1 %) of the hepatocyte surface unstained. Brief definition of some basic parameters: intersection node is a node in the network that is connected to more than two edges; first-order branch is a branch connecting two intersection nodes without disruption by a dead-end branch; second-order branch is a branch connecting two intersection nodes containing one or more than one dead-end branch in between; dead-end branch is a branch connected to the network by one end and unconnected at the other