When blood moves through your body, it exerts a frictional force on the walls of blood vessels. This force, known as fluid shear stress, has important effects on vascular development, function, and disease. A team at Yale, led by Martin Schwartz, PhD, Robert W. Berliner Professor of Medicine (cardiology), has identified a protein that helps your body sense and respond to changes in this shear stress.
This protein, latrophilin-2, is found on the surface of the cells lining the blood vessel wall. Schwartz’s team demonstrated that latrophilin-2 is activated by changes in blood flow and is required for flow-dependent blood vessel development and preclinical remodeling. Additionally, the authors found that specific variants of the gene encoding latrophilin-2 are highly associated with the development of cardiovascular disease in humans. These findings help define a novel pathway by which our blood vessels respond to changes in flow and shed new light on cell biology and genetic links to cardiovascular disease.
To learn more, read the paper, “Latrophilin-2 mediates fluid shear stress mechanotransduction at endothelial junctions.”
Tanaka K, Chen M, Prendergast A, Zhuang Z, Nasiri A, Joshi D, Hintzen J, Chung M, Kumar A, Mani A, Koleske A, Crawford J, Nicoli S, Schwartz MA. Latrophilin-2 mediates fluid shear stress mechanotransduction at endothelial junctions. EMBO J. 2024 Jun 17. doi: 10.1038/s44318-024-00142-0. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38886581.