Science News says the little tubes help immune cells travel from bone marrow to injured parts of the brain membrane:
In mice, inflammatory immune cells use these previously hidden channels to travel from the bone marrow of the skull to the brain, the team reports August 27 in Nature Neuroscience. It’s not yet known whether immune cells travel these paths through people’s skulls. If so, these tunnels represent a newfound way for immune cells to reach — and possibly inflame — the brain.
Along with other blood cells, immune cells are made in bones including those in the arm, leg, pelvis and skull. Researchers injected tracking dyes into bone marrow in the skull and other bones of mice, marking immune cells called neutrophils that originated in each locale. After a stroke, neutrophils flocked to the brain. Instead of coming equally from all sources of bone marrow, as some scientists had thought, most of these responding cells came from skull marrow, study coauthor Matthias Nahrendorf of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and colleagues found.
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In humans, these channels through the inside of the skull were 77 micrometers across on average.