Brain Drain

It's probably not surprising that our brains have huge energy demands. This also means they produce lots of waste. Waste throughout the rest of our bodies is removed via our lymphatic system, but researchers were unsure if the brain used the same system. A non-invasive MRI scanning technique called 3D FLAIR has allowed researchers to image the brain’s waste disposal system for the first time in living humans. Typically, scans of this nature would require external tracers, which are not completely safe and can't access the brain. Instead, researchers used the signals produced by the lymphatic vessels themselves to visualise their location and confirm that the human brain does have its own lymphatic vessels. This image shows two scans as if you were looking up at the brain from below. The left image shows the brain structures, the right shows how the lymphatic vessels (green) overlay with those structures.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Image from work by Mehmet Sait Albayram and colleagues
• Department of Radiology, University of Florida, College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, January 2022