The regulation of peripheral vascular function

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It is critical to maintain proper blood flow to cells and tissues. Blood flow is a regulator of the cell and tissue environment whereby blood flow both supplies nutrients and removes waste products. Adequate blood flow to tissues is critical for normal cellular and tissue function and health. Mismatching blood flow to tissue demand will result in cellular and tissue failure and damage. An important part of maintain proper blood flow to cells within a tissue is communication from those cells as to what amount of blood flow it requires. Cells need to communicate their needs for blood flow under resting conditions and communicate different needs when the cells are more active, for example, skeletal muscle cells during exercise. How cells communicate with blood vessel in order to coordinate the right amount of blood flow to satisfy their needs is not well understood. Our long term research goals are to determine how cells of tissues communicate their needs to blood vessels in order to maintain adequate blood flow and ensure proper tissue function. We plan to combine the use of skeletal muscle and microscopy to visualize blood vessels in skeletal muscle directly and contract skeletal muscle cells at different levels of activity. We use skeletal muscle as our test tissue because we can change its activity level easily and watch how the vasculature responds to these different activity levels. The first step is to understand how active muscle cells signal the cells of the blood vessels to communicate their blood flow needs. The second step in coordinating blood flow is to have the cells of the blood vessel network intercommunicate to change blood flow to the working muscles. Our research program will investigate both steps in the process. * This research program is generating knowledge relevant to understanding how adequate blood flow is supplied to tissues to maintain a healthy working environment. Achieving our research goals will lead to an understanding of the basic processes of blood flow regulation that can be expanded to any tissue. Understanding the basic physiology of the regulation of blood flow is the critical first step in understanding problems that result when the regulation is malfunctioning. Once we determine the basis of regulation this information can be used to solve problems with blood flow such as to identify ways to increase blood flow when necessary (i.e. to the placenta to enhance fetal health or to the peripheral tissue in a diabetic patient, or to the heart during heart failure) or decrease blood flow if necessary (i.e. in tumor vasculature). Critical to the understanding of any disease state is to first understand how processes work under normal healthy conditions. Our research program will contribute to the fundamental understanding the processes of blood flow regulation in the normal healthy state.*In addition, through these studies, this research program will contribute to both the education and training of the next generation of integrated physiologists by providing a rigorous and high quality training ground.