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By living in a 'world of water' fish are exposed to major challenges in maintaining water homeostasis. These are opposite in nature for fish living in marine and freshwater milieus; however, in both cases threatening, obligatory water fluxes due to global osmotic gradients must be compensated by opposite fluxes, driven by body fluid filtration and/or locally created osmotic gradients. In general, water may pass epithelia that are hydrophobic in nature by para- and/or transcellular pathways, the former mainly defined by the characteristics of tight junctions, the latter determined by the combined permeability of apical and baso-lateral cellular membranes. Transcellular water transport may occ...
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For a long time, the tight junction (TJ) was known to form and regulate the paracellular barrier between epithelia and endothelial cell sheets. Starting shortly after the discovery of the proteins forming the TJ—mainly the two families of claudins and TAMPs—several other functions have been discovered, a striking one being the surprising finding that some claudins form paracellular channels for small ions and/or water. This Special Issue includes 43 articles covering numerous dedicated topics including pathogens affecting the TJ barrier, TJ regulation via immune cells, the TJ as a therapeutic target, TJ and cell polarity, function and regulation by proteins of the tricellular TJ, TJ as a regulator of cellular processes, organ- and tissue-specific functions, TJ as sensors and reacting to environmental conditions, and last but not least, TJ proteins and cancer.