To understand the dangers of white blood cells in the immune system, Dr Tamara Girbl reached for her camera.
White blood cells, captured in the above image in red, are normally located in the blood stream. However, during bacterial or viral infections these immune cells breach the normally impermeable blood vessel walls (captured in blue and green) and infiltrate the infected tissues to fight against invading pathogens. Sometimes this response goes wrong and immune cells get inappropriately activated and harm our own tissue.
“Our field still does not fully understand the mechanism by which immune cells cross blood vessel walls to leave the blood stream” says Tamara, an immunology research fellow in the Centre for Microvascular Research at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry
This accumulation of white blood cell neutrophils in the heart or brain can exacerbate damage after a heart attack or stroke. Dr Girbl and her team at Queen Mary University have been investigating exactly what causes this accumulation of neutrophils for over three years in the hope of finding new and effective therapies to fight cardiovascular diseases.
“During my work as a researcher I am continuously amazed by the natural beauty of the micro-anatomic structures that build our blood vessel network. I took this image to share my experience with a wider audience” she explains.
The process of capturing this image wasn't easy. "I stained an inflamed muscle tissue with differently coloured fluorescent antibodies. These fluorescent antibodies bind to specific structures in the muscle and allow us to visualise different cell types in different colours using a confocal laser scanning microscope" Girbl adds.
The team opted for a Zeiss confocal microscope, which uses a laser to scan the images. To get the perfect shot, Girbl used a 20x magnification and captured an area of 2 mm x 1.4 mm in the tissue. “This image was part of an experiment which took me in total three days. The actual capturing of the image took me three hours, because it is very large for a microscope image,” she says.
"I want to emphasise the importance of research in understanding the movement patterns of immune cells to treat severe human pathological conditions”.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
