ARTICLE

THE ANATOMIC SITE OF THE TRANSEPITHELIAL PERMEABILITY BARRIERS OF TOAD BLADDER

Donald R. DiBona ¹, Mortimer M. Civan ¹, and Alexander Leaf ¹

¹ From the Departments of Medicine, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02114

An examination of the mucosal epithelium of the urinary bladder of the toad reveals that the two major cell types which abut on the urinary surface, the granular and mitochondria-rich cells, also contact the basement membrane. Thus, the epithelium functions as a single cell layer. Although basal cells are interpolated between the granular cells and the basement membrane over a large portion of the epithelium, they do not constitute an additional continuous cell layer. This finding is consistent with extensive physiological data which had assumed that the major permeability barriers of this epithelium were the apical and basal-lateral plasma membranes of a single layer of cells.

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