Below you see a developing mouse liver, two days after birth, stained for the biliary network in green.
Do you see the big green blob in the middle of the image? That is the gall bladder!
The bile ducts form a big network that collects bile from the hepatocytes, where it is produced, and transport it towards the gall bladder for storage. The gall bladder is thus connected to the bile ducts in the liver, but it is located just outside the liver.
When we are not eating, the produced and recycled bile is accumulated in the gall bladder. After a meal, this bile will be released into the intestine and help to digest fatty food.
How did we make the image?
Postnatal mouse liver tissue was collected and proteins were fixed. The liver was divided into lobes, and the median lobe was then stained as a whole, with an antibody against the protein Cytokeratin 19, which is expressed in bile epithelial cells. The tissue was then cleared to reduce light scatter and to allow to image deep into the tissue. The image was acquired with a lightsheet microscope and processed in IMARIS software by Elisabeth Verboven at the BIC facility at Karolinska Institutet.
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