Blood flow regulation: from rest to maximal exercise

At the annual Physiological Society's meeting held in Edinburgh this summer The Journal of Physiology sponsored a symposium on ‘Blood flow regulation: from rest to maximal exercise’. This specific topic has a long lasting tradition and status within the journal as for example highlighted by the seminal publications of Nobel Prize winner August Krogh (Krogh, 1919, 1920, 1921; Krogh et al. 1922) in which he gave the first detailed observations on capillary regulation, or the now neo-classic publication by Andersen & Saltin (1985) in which they demonstrated that the human skeletal muscle can be perfused with up to 250 ml of blood per minute per 100 g muscle mass. Indeed this article remains one of the most cited Journal of Physiology publications. That the topic remains timely and to excite the readership is exemplified by some of the mechanistically driven papers published within the last year (Bada et al. 2012; Casey et al. 2011; Srinivasa & Marshall, 2011; Stickland et al. 2011; Mortensen et al. 2012; Nyberg et al. 2012; Westcott et al. 2012). I sincerely hope that this outstanding track record will continue for many years to come also. In this issue excellent Symposium Reviews are published based on the presentations by the invited speakers Bengt Saltin (Saltin & Mortensen, 2012), Steven Segal (Behringer & Segal, 2012), Jose Calbet (Calbet & Lundby, 2012), Ylva Hellsten (Hellsten et al. 2012), Janice Marshall (Marshall & Ray, 2012) and Darren Casey (Casey & Joyner, 2012).