Lymphatic and blood systems: Identical or fraternal twins?

Florent Morfoisse; Agnès Noel

doi:10.1016/j.biocel.2019.105562

Lymphatic and blood systems: Identical or fraternal twins?

Int J Biochem Cell Biol. 2019 Sep:114:105562. doi: 10.1016/j.biocel.2019.105562. Epub 2019 Jul 3.

Authors

Florent Morfoisse¹, Agnès Noel²

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Tumor and Development Biology, GIGA (GIGA-Cancer), Liege University, B23, Avenue Hippocrate 13, 4000, Liege, Belgium.
² Laboratory of Tumor and Development Biology, GIGA (GIGA-Cancer), Liege University, B23, Avenue Hippocrate 13, 4000, Liege, Belgium. Electronic address: agnes.noel@uliege.be.

PMID: 31278994
DOI: 10.1016/j.biocel.2019.105562

Abstract

Blood and lymphatic systems work in close collaboration to ensure their respective physiological functions. The lymphatic vessel network is being extensively studied, but has been overlooked as compared to the blood vasculature mainly due to the problematic discrimination of lymphatic vessels from the blood ones. This issue has been fortunately resolved in the past decade leading to the emergence of a huge amount of data in lymphatic biology revealing many shared features with the blood vasculature. However, this likeliness between the two vascular systems may lead to a simplistic view of lymphatics and a direct transcription of what is known for the blood system to the lymphatic one, thereby neglecting the lymphatic specificities. In this context, this review aims to clarify the main differences between the two vascular systems focusing on recently discovered lymphatic features.

Keywords: Angiogenesis; Endothelium; Lymphangiogenesis; Signalling; VEGFR dimerization.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review

MeSH terms

Blood Vessels / physiology*
Humans
Lymphatic Vessels / physiology*
Twins, Dizygotic*