How does the liver work?

Your liver gets blood from two pipes, stores your sugar overnight, turns poison into waste and can grow back after most of it is removed. The liver is the largest organ inside you, about 1.2 to 1.5 kg, under your right ribs.

Read how it works: How does the liver work? · The history of understanding the liver · More boxes on Glassbox

Chapters in this interactive model

1. Meet your liver: The biggest organ inside you, with two blood supplies and a green drain.
2. Inside: 100,000 tiny hexagons: Blood flows in to the middle, bile flows out to the corners.
3. The sugar bank (and a factory): Store sugar after meals, pay it back between them, and build what blood needs.
4. Cleaning the blood: Ammonia into urea, alcohol into acetate, old red cells into bile.
5. Bile: the liver’s washing-up liquid: Made all day, stored in the gallbladder, poured on fat when you eat.
6. Regrowing, and what goes wrong: The organ that grows back, and the slow damage it can’t always undo.