Arterial tracing‐based technique for rapid purification of pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells from rat lungs
Lucynda Pham, Lauren Pavelich, Natascha Sommer, Lawrence I Grossman, Maik Hüttemann, Tasnim Arroum · 2026
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Description
The small arteries of the lung react to low oxygen by narrowing, and the smooth muscle cells driving that reaction are hard to harvest cleanly. Lucynda Pham and co-authors describe in 2026 a faster isolation method for rat lungs: agar tinted with food-safe blue dye traces the pulmonary arteries, so dissections can follow the vessels directly.
The harvested cells came out highly enriched, carrying the classic smooth muscle markers, and stayed uniform through four passages in culture. Crucially, they kept expressing COX4i2, a protein subunit essential to the oxygen response. Under chronic low oxygen they raised its levels, just as the cells do in the body. Earlier work showed animals lacking that subunit lose the response entirely. The authors offer the method as a reliable cell model for studying how lung arteries sense oxygen.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lucynda Pham, Lauren Pavelich, Natascha Sommer, Lawrence I Grossman, Maik Hüttemann, Tasnim Arroum |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 38 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |