Blood vessels play a critical role in supplying tissues with nutrients and gases while removing wastes. In the brain, blood vessels play an additional role in protecting nerve tissue from fluctuations of constituents that may occur elsewhere in the body. How blood vessels in the brain play this dual role is the subject of the research covered in the proposal. The work proposed here focuses on the blood vessels in amphibians and in reptiles. These animals have a unique arrangement of vessels in the brain and it is proposed that the arrangement itself plays an important role in how they work. Understanding how this unique blood vessel geometry works will allow us to understand the advantages and limitations to other vascular arrangements as well.
