The intercellular substance of a tissue. It forms the primary mass in some cartilage, bones, and the lens of the eye...where living cells are so separated they communicate with e-mail.
n. 1. (in histology) the substance of a tissue or organ in which more specialized structures are embedded; for example, the ground substance (extracellular matrix) of connective tissue. 2. (in radiology) the division of an image into rows and columns with equally sized elements (*pixels). The final image is completed by assigning a density to each of these elements. Increasing the number of pixels in the matrix improves the resolution of the final image. A typical value could be 256 rows × 256 columns.
(MMP) any one of a group of zinc-containing proteases capable of digesting the extracellular tissue matrix. These enzymes play an important role in cell division, cell migration, inflammation, neoplastic invasion (*metastasis), and *angiogenesis.... matrix metalloproteinase
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