Regulation of the paracellular permeability of the endothelial cell (EC) monolayer is essential for the normal function of the vascular system, and its impairment has severe pathological effects. VEGF and Ang1 (Angiopoietin-1) play essential but opposite roles in the regulation of EC junctions and vessel permeability. The molecular mechanisms through which these ligands affect vessel permeabili...

It has long been known that cells show reduced cell-substratum adhesion during mitosis in tissue culture, but it is not generally known whether cell-cell adhesion is also reduced. Epithelial cells, both in culture and in tissues, are linked together by several different types of intercellular junctions. Are these junctions disassembled when epithelial cells divide? Cultured epithelial cells wer...

A theory is presented for the intermembrane junction separation induced by the adhesion between two biomimetic membranes that contain two different types of anchored intermembrane junctions (receptor-ligand complexes). The analysis shows that several mechanisms contribute to the phase separation of the membrane junctions. These mechanisms include the following. (i) The elasticity of the membran...

The cell membranes of the tunicate heart exhibit an abundance of macular close junctions (also referred to as gap junctions or nexuses), distributed more or less randomly over the intercellular surfaces, and a system of zonal tight junctions limited to the cell borders adjacent to the epicardial surface. Three-dimensional images of these structures are displayed by the freeze-etch technique. In...

Cosmic superstring loops generically contain strings of different tensions that meet at Y-junctions. These loops evolve non-periodically in time, and have cusps and kinks that interact with the junctions. We study the effect of junctions on the gravitational wave signal emanating from cosmic string cusps and kinks. We find that earlier results on the strength of individual bursts from cusps and...

Changes in intercellular junctional morphology associated with rat liver regeneration were examined in a freeze-fracture study. After a two-thirds partial hepatectomy, both gap junctions and zonulae occludentes were drastically altered. Between 0 and 20 h after partial hepatectomy, the junctions appeared virtually unchanged. 28 h after partial hepatectomy, however, the large gap junctions usual...

In any partially inbred population, 'junctions' are the loci that form boundaries between segments of ancestral chromosomes. Here we show that the expected number of junctions per Morgan in such a population is linearly related to the inbreeding coefficient of the population, with a maximum in a completely inbred population corresponding to the prediction given by Stam (1980). We further show t...

Although circumstantial evidence has suggested that gap junctions mediate intercellular electrotonic coupling, it has not been possible in most tissues to exclude the involvement of other, coexisting cell junctions. We have made an electron microscopic study of replicas of frozen-fractured BHK21 cells (from tissue culture) and of brown fat cells of newborn mice. Both of these cell types are kno...

In this paper, we discuss the current state of organic and molecular-scale electronics, some experimental methods used to characterize charge transport through molecular junctions and some theoretical models (superexchange and barrier tunnelling models) used to explain experimental results. Junctions incorporating self-assembled monolayers of organic molecules - and, in particular, junctions wi...

Inhomogeneous surrounds can produce either asymmetrical or symmetrical increment/decrement induction by orienting T-junctions to selectively group a test patch with surrounding regions [Melfi, T., & Schirillo, J. (2000). T-junctions in inhomogeneous surrounds. Vision Research, 40, 3735-3741]. The current experiments aimed to determine where T-junctions are processed by presenting each eye with ...