Chance finding reveals new control on blood vessels in developing brain

Zhen Huang freely admits he was not interested in blood vessels four years ago when he was studying brain development in a fetal mouse.

Instead, he wanted to see how changing a particular gene in brain cells called glia would affect the growth of neurons.

The result was hemorrhage, caused by deteriorating veins and arteries, and it begged for explanation.

"It was a surprising finding," says Huang, an assistant professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I was mainly interested in the neurological aspect, how the brain develops and wires itself to prepare for all the wonderful things it does."

But chance favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur said, and Huang knew he needed to follow up on the suggestion that glia, normally considered “helpers” for the neurons, would affect the growth of blood vessels. For one thing, blood flow is a big deal in the brain, says Huang, whose collaborators included Shang Ma, in the graduate program in cellular and molecular biology at UW-Madison. “We know the brain is very energy-intensive. Per unit of volume, it consumes 10 times as much oxygen as the rest of the body.”

Although it makes intuitive sense that blood vessel development should be guided by neuronal development in some fashion, Huang spent years making sure he wasn’t being mislead by his experiment. Now, he’s satisfied himself, and his scientific reviewers, and the journal PLOS Biology has just published his study.