Fig. 1

Histopathological features of BLEL. a H&E staining showing lymphocytic infiltration in BLEL tissues (red arrows), acinar atrophy (black arrows) and fibrotic area (blue arrows). In the CH panel, * indicates dilated blood vessels while the blue arrows indicated cells with fibroblast-like morphology. b The left panel indicates Collagen fibers stained in blue with Masson’s Trichrome. The right panel: immunohistochemistry with a collagen type III antibody detected collagen synthesis and identified the collagen-producing cells in BLEL and CH tissue biopsies. c Vimentin-positive fibroblasts (red), α-SMA expressing cells (green) and myofibroblasts (yellow) co-expressing vimentin and α-SMA were observed in BLEL and CH. Myofibroblasts (yellow) were mainly localized in the fibrotic area in BLEL tissues. (D) α-SMA and vimentin expression were also confirmed by western blot. The MMP9 expression has also been accessed by western blot (d) and immunohistochemistry (e). The staining and the immunohistochemistry results presented in this figure are representative of experiments performed on: H&E staining (CH: n = 30; BLEL: n = 50); Masson staining (CH: n = 5; BLEL: n = 5); Collagen type III immunostaining (CH: n = 4; BLEL: n = 4); vimentin and α-SMA co-expression (CH: n = 4; BLEL: n = 5); MMP9 immunostaining (CH: n = 4; BLEL: n = 4) tissue biopsies. Original magnification: 20× for images with a 100 μm scale bare or 40× for those with a 50 μm scale bare