Abstract
Last November a group of principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows and PhD students from around the world got together in the city of Merida in Southeastern Mexico in a State of the Art meeting on the “Molecular structure and function of the apical junctional complex in epithelial and endothelia.” They analyzed diverse tissue barriers including those in the gastrointestinal tract, the blood brain barrier, blood neural and blood retinal barriers. The talks revealed exciting new findings in the field, novel technical approaches and unpublished data and highlighted the importance of studying junctional complexes to better understand several pathogenesis and to develop therapeutic approaches that can be utilized for drug delivery. This meeting report has the purpose of highlighting the results and advances discussed by the speakers at the Merida Meeting.