Abstract
The brain’s high energy requirements drive the need for close coupling of local neuronal activity to blood supply. Capillaries have been shown to dilate before arterioles in response to sensory stimulation, pointing to a key role for microvascular pericytes in mediating cerebrovascular dynamics. However, many aspects of these cells’ function remain unknown and even controversial, from their identification, to the mechanism and regulation of their contractility in physiology and disease. Investigating how pericytes regulate vascular diameter is therefore likely to be the subject of many future experiments. Here we provide protocols for three different techniques (ex vivo slice imaging, in vivo imaging, and immunohistochemistry) that are highly valuable for performing such experiments.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by funding from the Physiological Society, the Royal Society, and the University of Sussex Junior Research Associate scheme. We would like to thank Devin Clarke and Orla Bonnar for comments on the manuscript, David Attwell for providing the NG2/DsRed mice to start our colony, and Leon Lagnado for practical support.
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Boyd, K., Hammond-Haley, M., Vroman, R., Hall, C.N. (2021). Imaging Pericytes and the Regulation of Cerebral Blood Flow. In: Péault, B.M. (eds) Pericytes. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2235. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1056-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1056-5_7
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