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Liver Sieve Research
Group - Structure
The hepatic ultrastructure:
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This beautiful tree with its myriad of leaves, synthesizing and detoxifying,
resembles the liver. The liver in a human is about the size of football,
weighs about 2kg, and is made of about one million primary modules
(lobules or acini) which are almost identical, like the leaves of the
tree
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Cast of portal vein of rat. Alessandra Warren
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This slice of 'nutmeg liver', congested due to heart failure, shows
up these lobules (leaves!) approximately 2mm in diameter, with their
congested central veins.
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This drawing from an old German text book (Diseases of the Liver.
F T Frerichs, 1862) shows such a liver, and a magnified lobule that
is actually only about 2x1x2mm in size.
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This drawing from Beale's microscope in 1880 shows the lobules (leaves)
with a portal vein at the upper end carrying blood from the gut.
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This second drawing by Beale of a single lobule (real size about
2x1x2mm) with the blood entering the lobule at its periphery, and the
tiny network of capillaries, or sinusoids, running through it to the
central hepatic vein.
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The liver biopsy needle (from about 40 years ago) is probing the
liver in the upper right abdomen.
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The core of liver tissue from the needle.
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A cast of the approximately 0.5-1mm long sinusoids at x10,000 magnification
(with thanks to Eddie Wisse)
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A diagram (after Muto of Gifu) showing the fenestrated sinusoids
separating the columns of hepatocytes.
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A lymphocyte traversing a fenestrated sinusoid.
We estimate there to be aboutt 1 million lobules in a 2kg human liver,
each lobule containing at least 1000 sinusoids 0.5-1.0mm in length, and
700nm in breadth. Thus we estimate there are over 1 billion sinusoids,
with blood sluggishly flowing in parallel through each one.
These measurements are estimates, and we await with interest our own
and Prof Teutsch's measurements.
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