A Gel Coating Your Hairy Endothelium

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To follow up on one of Nate’s posts from 2010,hair grows not only on your skin. He describes a glomerular capillary to behairy. Glycocalyx, a hairy structure attached to the glomerular endothelium, is a mixture of glycosaminoglycans and proteoglycans. Thepicture of glycocalyx accompanying that post is quite impressive.Now we know these hairs are coated with another gel matrixcalled endothelial surface layer (ESL). ESL,together with glycocalyx, is believed to function as a barrier to preventprotein passage from blood to urine. A recent article addressing this topic waspublished in JASN.By using an animalmodel, the authors showed that loss of ESL increases the sieving co-efficientfor albumin and that the degree of albuminuria correlates with the degree ofESL loss (by the way their confocal microscopy images of ESL are pretty cool).The implication ofthe study is that it’s not just podocyte or GBM that are responsible for thedevelopment of proteinuria; ESL, glycocalyx and endothelium appear to play animportant role as well. For example, loss of ESL has been reported in patientswith diabetes. Maybe it’s not just on the skin where hair loss occurs. For those who are interested in this topic, there is a nicereview article for further reading.  
Posted by Tomoki Tsukahara