Friday, February 21, 2014

Where does von Willebrand Factor come from?

A question about von Willebrand Factor – where is it stored?
All that I can gather is that it’s stored in ‘Weibel-Palade bodies’, but where are they? Are they in the vessel wall, in the platelet, free-floating in the blood? It’s confusing me a little bit.

Von Willebrand Factor is a huge multimeric protein that is made by megakaryocytes and endothelial cells. It functions in both the initial, platelet-plug phase of hemostasis (in which it glues the platelets to the endothelium), and in the second, fibrin-forming phase of hemostasis (in which it serves as a carrier molecule for factor VIII that keeps factor VIII from being prematurely degraded).

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Where does von Willebrand Factor come from?





















Source: Parhology Student
Image credits: Kristine Krafts, M.D.