Speaker
Description
The liver contributes to maintaining metabolic homeostasis by clearing toxins from the bloodstream. Blood enters through portal veins, flows through the tissue where hepatocytes remove toxins, and exits through central veins. This process occurs within a highly organized microarchitecture in which portal and central veins form repeating functional units called lobules. In cross-section, lobules display a polygonal arrangement with portal veins at the vertices and a central vein at the center. Although lobules are commonly depicted as hexagonal, the precise functional advantage of this geometry remains unclear.
We investigate how lobule geometry influences detoxification using a reaction-diffusion framework in which portal veins act as sources of toxin-rich blood and the central vein acts as a sink. Toxins spread through the tissue while hepatocytes remove toxins locally. Within this framework we explore several measures of detoxification efficiency across different spatial organizations of the veins.
To capture more realistic conditions, we develop a spatial CompuCell3D model in which hepatocytes lose their detoxification capacity when exposed to damage. Under these nonlinear dynamics, hexagonal lobule organization proves more robust than other tessellations in minimizing toxin levels reaching the central veins, revealing a potential functional advantage of the hexagonal architecture of liver lobules.
