pharyngeal pouch

An internal pocketing of pharyngeal endoderm that contacts a region of ectoderm (a pharyngeal cleft) and interdigitates in the anterior and posterior directions with the pharyngeal arches. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.

What the pharyngeal pouch is

An internal pocketing of pharyngeal endoderm that contacts a region of ectoderm (a pharyngeal cleft) and interdigitates in the anterior and posterior directions with the pharyngeal arches. The atlas records it as a tissue at the tissue scale in the human body.

Where the pharyngeal pouch is

It sits within the digestive system. Only the system is known. The position shown carries almost no spatial information.

What the pharyngeal pouch connects to

The atlas records 17 typed relationships for it, across 5 kinds of connection. part of digestive tract, embryo and embryonic structure, and 2 more.

Supply and innervation

This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the pharyngeal pouch. Only a minority of structures carry those edges here, so an empty answer means nothing has been recorded — not that there is nothing to record.

Also called

Also recorded as branchial pouch, visceral pouch, pharyngeal pouches and visceral pouches. Searching any of those names reaches this page.

Source

Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0004117, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

• Part of: digestive tract, embryo, embryonic structure, foregut and pharyngeal arch system.
• A kind of: embryonic structure, endo-epithelium, epithelium, tissue and unilaminar epithelium.
• Adjacent to: pharyngeal cleft.
• subtype: pharyngeal pouch 1, pharyngeal pouch 2, pharyngeal pouch 3 and pharyngeal pouch 4.
• overlaps: pharyngeal arch and pharyngeal membrane.

Questions

Where is the pharyngeal pouch?

It sits within the digestive system. Only the system is known. The position shown carries almost no spatial information.

What does the pharyngeal pouch connect to?

Part of: digestive tract, embryo, embryonic structure, foregut and pharyngeal arch system.

Is the pharyngeal pouch the same in other species?

Leumas holds the same relationship vocabulary for every species it carries, so where another dataset records this structure you can put the two side by side on /compare.