3. Adding some muscle to blood coagulation.
In this issue of Blood, Deguchi et al have established a mechanism by which skeletal muscle promotes thrombin generation through binding of factor Xa and factor Va to myosin.
11. "Fishing" out the real VEGFs.
In this issue of Blood, using an elegant zebrafish-based model, Rossi et al demonstrated that vascular endothelial growth factor B (VEGFB), VEGFD, and placenta growth factor (PlGF) are able to sustain vascularization in the absence of VEGFA and generated dominant-negative VEGF mutants, thereby identifying new antiangiogenic strategies. There are multiple important points in this article which not only change our current understanding of the mechanisms of vascular growth in a complexity of vivo settings, but also advance the search for promising therapeutic approaches seeking to interfere with pathological vascularization.
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