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Your liver loves you

Learn more from the image where the cross-section of the portal vein looks like a heart.



Portal vein

The liver filters and detoxifies the blood that comes in from the intestines, stomach and spleen through the hepatic portal vein, which looks like a heart in the picture. Potral veins are not in reality shaped like a heart. They create a branching tree inside the liver, with the trunk located at the hilum of the organ and branches spreading towards the organ periphery. Most likely, this cross-section through the tissue captures the branching portal vein and thus created the shape we see. Nevertheless, this is a lovely picture that reminds us that the liver loves us and works relentlessly to keep us safe and happy.



Cells inside the liver

Close to the portal veins, we find a bile duct, through which the bile is safely transported. A bile duct is made of cholangiocytes. On this picture, we also see hepatocytes, very important cells that produced the bile in the first place and perform many of the liver metabolic functions. The nuclei of the cells are labeled in grey. We can see that the hepatocytes have much larger nuclei than cholangiocytes, which is one of the characteristics that helps us quickly recognize these cell types apart.


How did we make the picture?

The liver tissue was collected, fixed and sliced into 100 micrometer sections. These were stained with fluorescent dyes and antibodies to detect different cellular parts. In magenta we see F-actin, cells's skeleton, accumulated at cell borders, in grey we see a dye that intercalates into DNA and allows us to see cells' nuclei. The image was acquired at Leica Stellaris 5X microcope with a 63x objective.


Tissue was collected by Lenka Belicova, stained, imaged and presented by Estela Del Mar Sosa Osorio.

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