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A Stunning 3D Map of Blood Vessels and Cells in a Mouse Skull Could Help Scientists Make New Bones:

"We need to see what's happening inside the skull, including the relative locations of blood vessels and cells and how their organization changes during injury and over time," says Warren Grayson, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Craniofacial and Orthopaedic Tissue Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His lab focuses on developing biomaterials and transplanting stem cells into the skull to re-create missing bone tissue.

Other scientists have provided maps of small portions of blood vessels and stem cells in the mouse skull. "However, a larger picture of the skull gives us a better understanding of the entire vasculature and distribution of different stem cell types," says Alexandra Rindone, graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine and first author of the paper.

The new map, published Oct. 28 in Nature Communications, is a 3D view of the top of a mouse skull -- its cranial bone, or calvaria -- which is made up of four connected skull bones.

To create the map, which includes hundreds of thousands of cells, the Johns Hopkins researchers used four key techniques to pinpoint vessels and cells.