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. 2021 Jul 22;11:142. doi: 10.1186/s13578-021-00650-0

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — Cellular constituents of BBB neurovascular unit. The cooperation of brain ECs, pericytes, and end-feet astrocytes together establish a unique protective barrier restricting blood cell transfer to brain parenchyma. Pericytes surround ECs throughout the cytoplasm and wrap the abluminal side of ECs. ECs are interconnected by expressing different types of junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs). Claudins, occludin, and JAMs are the most functional proteins present in TJs with active participation in the regulation of various biomolecules exchange. The transmembrane adhesion complexes are linked to the cytoskeleton through a series of cytoplasmic adaptors including zonula occludens (ZO)-1, ZO-2, cingulin, Jacob, membrane-associated guanylate kinase inverted (MAGIs), and Membrane palmitoylated proteins (MPPs). The TJs interact with basal adherens junctions (AJs) and are linked to the actin/vinculin-based cytoskeleton by catenins. Lym Lymphocytes, Neu Neutrophils, Mon Monocytes, RBC Red blood cells