TRiPs Across Epithelial and Endothelial Barriers in Health and Disease (eBook)

Life on Earth began some 4 billion years ago when the first primitive prokaryotes managed to isolate themselves from the rather hostile environment. The immediate challenge that these first life forms faced was to ensure an optimal balance between two apparently mutually exclusive tasks - protection and separation from the extracellular milieu on the one hand and an efficient exchange of ions, energy sources and metabolites with the very same milieu on the other hand. The commencing evolutionary progress had to address even more challenging problems, such as how to delegate specific cell functions to discrete structures inside of the cell, called organelles (such as the nucleus), and, at the level of multi-cellular organisms, to ensure proper separation of different cell types (e.g. those found in different tissues and organs) while ensuring efficient communication between them. In fact, the human body is highly compartmentalized, from the cell level where local signals are generated and propagated in a highly ordered manner, to the whole body level. This book aims to introduce the interested reader to the universe of these complex segregated compartments in mammals. It discusses how the integrity of different types of barriers - endothelial, epithelial - is normally maintained and what could go wrong when these barriers' permeability becomes abnormally low or high in different disease states. We will focus on several such barriers, which are well studied and which are pivotal for a healthy well-being. In particular, we will focus on the skin, airways, the gut barrier, the endometrium, and cardiovascular and urinary systems. Special reference throughout the book will be made to several most novel groups of potential molecular candidates for the correction of barrier-related dysfunctions, in particular Transient Receptor Potential channels. Hence the title of the book has a triple meaning - a trip in its common sense, TRP channels (as in TRiP database) and Translating Research Into Practice (TRIP). Our team of authors is comprised of physiologists, pharmacologists, biophysicists and medics, including the national representative of Ukraine in the European Crohn's and Colitis organization (ECCO) and a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Association of Urologists. We include clinical cases and discuss molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying such real-life problems in-depth.