conjunctival lymphatic response to corneal inflammation in mice结膜角膜炎症小鼠淋巴反应.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Ophthalmology Volume 2012, Article ID 953187, 6 pages doi:10.1155/2012/953187 Research Article Conjunctival Lymphatic Response to Corneal Inflammation in Mice Tatiana Ecoiffier, Anna Sadovnikova, Don Yuen, and Lu Chen Center for Eye Disease and Development, Program in Vision Science, and School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Lu Chen, chenlu@ Received 14 September 2011; Revised 7 November 2011; Accepted 8 November 2011 Academic Editor: Shintaro Nakao Copyright © 2012 Tatiana Ecoiffier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Due to its unique characteristics, the cornea has been widely used for vascular research. However, it has never been studied whether lymphatic vessels in the conjunctiva, its neighboring tissue, are affected by corneal lymphangiogenesis (LG). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the distribution pattern of conjunctival lymphatic vessels changes during LG using a standardized two-suture placement model. Our data from immunofluorescent microscopic studies demonstrate, for the first time, that conjunctival lymphatic vessels were more distributed in the nasal side under both normal and inflamed conditions. Additionally, under the inflamed condition, conjunctival lymphatic vessels showed a higher density and more branching points, indicating that LG occurs in the conjunctiva in response to corneal inflammation. This study not only provides novel insights into lymphatic events in the ocular surface but also offers new gu