ABSTRACT
Paula Dore-Duffy,1,* Nilufer Esen2,a and Zakhar Serkin2,b
The French scientist Charles-Marie Benjamin Rouget identifi ed the microvascular pericyte in the late 1800s (Rouget 1874). He named this cell the Rouget cell and described it as a contractile, motile cell that surrounded capillaries in a tunic-like fashion. The discoveries of Rouget were confi rmed in the early 1900s and fi rst reviewed by Doré (Doré 1923). The Rouget cell was renamed the pericyte vise-a-vie its peri-endothelial location within the pre-capillaries, capillaries and post-capillary venules (Fig. 1A). Despite the ensuing years and an enormous increase in the published literature the pericyte has remained a truly enigmatic cell. Pericytes have been defi ned as: (1) peculiar cells that are elongated, contractile and wrap around arterioles outside of the basal lamina (Baillère’s Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary 1988); (2) adventitial cells (Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1995); (3) smooth muscle cells of the capillaries (Fabry et al. 1993, Ding et al. 2004); (4) broad fl at cells with projections (Wikipedia.org/wiki/pericyte); (5) Ito cells (Hautekeete and Geerts 1997); (6) stellate or mesangial cells (Diaz-Flores et al. 2009); (7) mesenchymal stem cells (Caplan 2008); (8) endothelial progenitor cells (Torsney and Xu 2011); (9) mural/ stromal cells of the capillaries (Zimmerlin et al. 2010); (10) adult pluripotent stem
1 Department of Neurology, Wayne State University School of Medicine, 421 E. Canfi eld Ave, Suite 3126, Detroit, MI 48201.
