Learn more from the movie with the developing bile ducts.
Bile ducts
The bile ducts are a specialized system of tubes in the liver that contains and transports bile. Bile is produced by hepatocytes in the liver and transported to the intestine to help us degrade fatty food. However, bile is toxic if it contacts other liver cells. Therefore, it is accumulated in the bile ducts and stored in the gall bladder, until it can be released into the
intestine for digestion. During embryonic development, a subset of cells in the liver become cholangiocytes. These cells will later reorganize in a tubular network that we call the bile ducts. In the movie above, you see the developing bile duct network being formed with the maturing tubes in white. The leftover cholangiocytes inbetween the tubes will disappear later on, and only the functional network of tubes will remain.
Development of the bile ducts
In the developing liver, cholangiocytes appear all around the blood vessels and form a network of bile ducts, both tiny ones as well as some big bile duct tubes. Once the main duct matures, most of the other, ‘leftover’ cholangiocytes will disappear so that only an organized system of bile ducts will remain to accumulate all the produced bile and bring it to the gall bladder for storage.
How did we make the movie?
The liver tissue was collected and proteins were fixed. The liver was stained as a whole, with an antibody against the protein Cytokeratin 19, which is expressed by cholaniocytes. The tissue was then cleared to reduce light scatter and allow to image deep into the tissue. An image of the whole liver was acquired with a lightsheet microscope with the 6.3x objective. The shown region of interest was segmented from the original image, and a movie was created with IMARIS software. The imaging and processing was performed by Elisabeth Verboven at the BIC facility at Karolinska Institutet.
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