Every three months, the Editor and Deputy Editors select five articles for inclusion in the FEATURED ARTICLE section of the
AJP-Lung web page. (http://ajplung.physiology.org/)
These
articles are likely to have a significant impact on their fields and
they are the best demonstration of the excellence of AJP-Lung. They can
be downloaded in their entirety even if a reader does not have a
subscription to the journal. A brief summary
of one of these articles is provided by Dr. Rory Morty, Deputy Editor,
of AJP-Lung.
Sadis Matalon, Editor in Chief.
The
extracellular matrix (ECM) has long been accredited with
pathophysiological roles in the lung. A large volume of important
work has addressed the ECM in lung disease, largely by examining the
abundance or paucity of key ECM molecules, notably collagen and elastin,
in the lungs of experimental animals or clinical subjects with lung
disease. Little attention has been paid to how
perturbations to ECM structure actually impact the physiological
function of the ECM, particularly related to how the ECM structure may
drive phenotypic changes in the behavior of lung cells that rest, or are
in contact with, the underlying ECM. This is particularly
important in tissues where disease processes results in major changes in
the composition or distribution of the ECM. In a recent issue of the
Journal, Shkumatov and colleagues report on how changes in the
mechanical stiffness of a model matrix can influence
the behavior of airway smooth muscle cells (ASMC). In their study, the
investigators cultured ASMC on collagen-conjugated
polyacrylamide hydrogels with controlled elastic moduli. The remarkable
observations were
(i) that “softer” gels caused increased secretion of pro-angiogenic
growth factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) by ASMC
while in contrast; (ii) “harder” gels stimulated ASMC proliferation and
reduced both VEGF secretion and histamine-induced
calcium responses. These responses were correlated with the expression
of components of the integrin system, namely integrin-beta1 and the
integrin-linked kinase. Thus, the authors conclusively demonstrate that
ASMC are very responsive to the mechanical stiffness
of collagen-conjugated hydrogels, which are useful and elegant models of
cell adhesion matrices that can be manipulated to alter the elastic
modulus. These studies contribute
enormously to an emerging body of work that has
started to address how the properties (as opposed to the abundance) of
the ECM may drive pathological (and indeed, normal physiological)
processes. The authors are to be commended on a most interesting study,
which will undoubtedly form the basis of further
exciting studies that we hope to see published in the pages of the
Journal in the future.
Commentary by Dr. Rory Morty, Deputy Editor AJP-Lung
No comments:
Post a Comment