Pericytes of the neurovascular unit: Key functions and signaling pathways

By Melanie D. Sweeney, Shiva Ayyadurai, Berislav Zlokovic. Nature Neuroscience, 2016

979 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pericytes are vascular mural cells embedded in the basement membrane of blood microvessels. They extend their processes along capillaries, pre-capillary arterioles and post-capillary venules. CNS pericytes are uniquely positioned in the neurovascular unit between endothelial cells, astrocytes and neurons. They integrate, coordinate and process signals from their neighboring cells to generate diverse functional responses that are critical for CNS functions in health and disease, including regulation of the blood–brain barrier permeability, angiogenesis, clearance of toxic metabolites, capillary hemodynamic responses, neuroinflammation and stem cell activity. Here we examine the key signaling pathways between pericytes and their neighboring endothelial cells, astrocytes and neurons that control neurovascular functions. We also review the role of pericytes in CNS disorders including rare monogenic diseases and complex neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and brain tumors. Finally, we discuss directions for future studies.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8de004b417e0d6dec332f7d2596037cecfe453b

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

1. Fenna M. Krienen

In Molecular Biology

1. Steven A. McCarroll
2. Alec Wysoker
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In Neurology

1. Cynthia Hajal
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Citations in the corpus

• Molecular Diversity and Specializations among the Cells of the Adult Mouse Brain (2018, background): “Mural cells are intrinsic to the endothelium and control vascular development, stability, and homeostasis (Sweeney et al., 2016; Trost et al., 2016).”
• A Single-Cell Atlas of Cell Types, States, and Other Transcriptional Patterns from Nine Regions of the Adult Mouse Brain (2018, background): “We focus here on cell classes that form the blood-brain barrier – mural, endothelial tip and endothelial stalk cells – because they are disease-relevant (Sweeney et al., 2016) and remain incompletely characterized ( Figure 5B ).”
• Functional morphology of the blood-brain barrier in health and disease (2018, neutral): “PCs are the cells of the NVU most firmly attached to the endothelium, and as cellular “relatives” of smooth muscle cells they may regulate vessel diameter, thereby controlling physiological parameters of blood supply [124], although these findings are controversial.”
• 3D Self-Organized Microvascular Model of the Human Blood-Brain Barrier with Endothelial Cells, Pericytes and Astrocytes (2018, background): “Indeed, it has already been shown that co-culture of ECs with PCs is required for BBB formation and the maintenance of homeostasis by contact and paracrine interactions [54].”