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Basement Membrane Polarizes Epithelial Cells And Its Loss Can Result In Neoplastic Disorganization, Donald Elliot Ingber

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

The studies described in this dissertation demonstrate that basement membrane may be required for maintenance of organized epithelial tissue architecture. The structural organization of normal rat pancreatic acinar epithelium is fully characterized in order to analyze its neoplastic disorganization within a pancreatic acinar cell tumor. Transmission electron microscopy and indirect immunofluorescence microscopy of frozen semithin tissue sections are utilized to localize different components of the plasmalemma, cytoskeleton, basement membrane and connective tissue. Normal acinar cells sit on a continuous basement membrane and display a polarized distribution of intracellular organelles, cytoskeletal elements, and distinct membrane domains while these organized cell relations …