Changes in bladder extracellular matrix--overview.

Abstract

For starting this session I have a couple of slides that will help me in giving a brief overview of this topic. This is one of those conceptual overviews, and not one that is rich with data. What we really ought to think about is the fact that the bladder, the way we normally think about it, tends to be a visual simplification. We think of it in terms from our textbooks of histology as a layer of glycosaminoglycans, mucosa, lamina propia, and muscle. So we always think about the cells we associate with bladder structure. However as we have seen over these past two days, there is a lot more to it than just these cell populations. So if you will just think about this analogy; think about this room here. This room has a nice aesthetically pleasing ceiling, nice wall paper, pictures, and all of those things are equivalent to those cells within the bladder wall that we normally look at. But what is behind these walls. There is steel within these walls that we don’t see that extends on down to the foundation to provide the ultimate structural support and that is indeed what the extracellular matrix is. It is the supporting matrix for the cells, and I just borrowed this slide from Paul Ehrlich because it shows so nicely what we are talking about. You have the matrix, in this case collagen, that is the scaffolding or the steel structure of the bladder. Then you have the cells that are intimately associated with it in such as way that you can’t always tell where the cell ends and the collagen begins.