Bright Blood

Finding a leak and checking how much water is escaping is key to understanding the problem and preventing damage to your home. Researchers looking at subarachnoid haemorrhage – SAH, a severe type of stroke caused by bleeding from a ruptured vessel on the brain surfaces – need a better way to assess bleeding in experiments with mice. Their current techniques are not sensitive enough to track minor bleeding in mice with SAH, but understanding how this bleeding ultimately causes such lethal damage is important for developing novel treatments. A new approach uses a probe called TTVP, which is clear when dissolved in water but shines brightly under a UV light when blood is added (as shown here). It binds to proteins in blood and points the way to the rupture, helping researchers measure the flow, assess how the damage is caused, and test the impact of new treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Video from work by Maliang Tao and colleagues
• Department of Laboratory Medicine, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Science, January 2023