Immunopathology of Airway Surface Liquid Dehydration Disease

Airway Surface Liquid

In this issue of The Journal, Jayaraman and colleagues (2001) describe a novel technique to measure the osmo-lality of airway surface liquid (ASL) using fluorophore-encapsulated liposomes. As in a recent paper reporting measurements of ASL depth, salt concentration, and pH (Jayaraman et al., 2001), this group has once again exploited fluorescence microscopy in an innovative fashion to avoid the...

Airway Surface Liquid: End of the Controversy?

Airway surface liquid composition in mice.

Airway surface liquid (ASL) lines the conducting airways of the respiratory tract. We collected small samples of this liquid from the lower tracheae of anesthetized C57BL/6 mice and determined its ionic composition (in mM: 87.2 Na(+), 4.7 K(+), and 57.0 Cl(-)). Intravenous methacholine produced significant increases in the concentrations of Na(+), K(+), and Cl(-) within ASL. A limited analysis ...

Airway surface liquid depth imaged by surface laser reflectance microscopy

The thin layer of liquid at the surface of airway epithelium, the airway surface liquid (ASL), is important in normal airway physiology and in the pathophysiology of cystic fibrosis. At present, the best method to measure ASL depth involves scanning confocal microscopy after staining with an aqueous-phase fluorescent dye. We describe here a simple, noninvasive imaging method to measure ASL dept...

Immunopathology of Chagas disease.

The main clinical forms of Chagas disease (acute, indeterminate and chronic cardiac) present strong evidences for the participation of the immune system on pathogenesis. Although parasite multiplication is evident during acute infection, the intense acute myocarditis of this phase exhibits clear ultrastructural signs of cell-mediated immune damage, inflicted to parasitized and non-parasitized m...