An ultrastructural investigation of developing vasomotor innervation in rat peripheral vessels

The developing innervation was investigated in three muscular peripheral arteries from male Wistar rats. These were the superficial epigastric and saphenous arteries, branching from the femoral artery in the thigh, and the tail artery. At maturity the tail and saphenous are similar in size and the s...

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Veröffentlicht in:American journal of anatomy 1981-02, Vol.160 (2), p.195-212
Hauptverfasser: Todd, Mary E., Tokito, Mariko K.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:The developing innervation was investigated in three muscular peripheral arteries from male Wistar rats. These were the superficial epigastric and saphenous arteries, branching from the femoral artery in the thigh, and the tail artery. At maturity the tail and saphenous are similar in size and the superficial epigastric is about half the size of the other two. They are approximately the same size at birth and were chosen because of the resemblance of the tunica media among them. The general pattern of the developing innervation was similar in all three, starting with nerve processes containing mainly empty vesicles. As development proceeded, the processes usually were enclosed within Schwann cells, and both the number of clear vesicles and the number of vesicles with dense cores increased. Tubular membranes probably budded off vesicles. The development of the innervation was mainly postnatal, although some processes seen in the fetus may have been growth cones. The tail artery was the latest to develop recognizable nerves, although the number increased dramatically and had surpassed those in the other two vessels by 12 days of age. It had the densest nerve plexus at maturity. Only adrenergic vasomotor innervation was present in these vessels. The nerves retained a precise relationship, adjacent to the outermost layer of smooth muscle cells and external elastic lamina, throughout development. The Schwann cell population increased very slowly and was similar in each vessel at each age. This meant that the tail artery had many more nerve processes per Schwann cell than the other two vessels. These three muscular arteries, then, varied in the rate of development of their adrenergic innervation and in the final density.
ISSN:0002-9106
1553-0795
DOI:10.1002/aja.1001600206