HUVEC express vacuoles on transwells
My goal for this experiment was to see whether vacuoles form in primary cells. If they did, this makes the case that the results with bEnd3 are more physiologically relevant since primary cells are better models of in vivo behavior. Here, I simply seeded P8 HUVEC at 50000 cells/cm2 on plastic wells, PET and pnc-Si (SC502) transwells. I let them grow for 1 day and then stained with Live/Dead.
A PET transwell showed that most cells had vacuoles:
By contrast, HUVEC on flat tissue culture plastic didn’t express vacuoles:
HUVEC on 2 different pnc-Si transwell samples:
Vacuole expression was limited to the free-standing membrane. I repeated this experiment 1 more type with passage 9 cells, as well.
So, primary cells also express vacuoles over free-standing pnc-Si membranes.