Abstract.
The preparation of pure cardiac myocyte cultures from neonatal rats is hampered by the presence of non-myocytes, which can proliferate during culturing, thereby causing a progressive decrease in the proportion of myocytes. In order to obtain myocyte cell suspensions of high purity, a method based on centrifugal elutriation was developed. Cardiac cells, isolated from neonatal rat heart ventricles, were subjected to elutriation using flow rates that increased step-wise from 20 to 80 ml/min. The cell fraction obtained at 80 ml/min consisted of 68–90% myocytes. Still, upon culturing, the remaining non-myocytes proliferate, causing the proportion of myocytes to decrease to 60±2% at day 5. A second elutriation protocol was developed in which myocytes and non-myocytes were separated after a period of co-culturing for 4–5 days. By this approach a fibroblast-rich cell fraction (87±5%) and a myocyte-rich cell fraction (82±6%) were obtained. In conclusion, centrifugal elutriation creates the opportunity to separate neonatal rat myocytes from non-myocytes, either freshly isolated or after a period of culturing. Particularly, cell separation after a period of culturing ventricular cells offers an advantage to analyse the experimental effects on myocytes and non-myocytes separately.
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Boerma, M., van der Wees, C., Wondergem, J. et al. Separation of neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and non-myocytes by centrifugal elutriation. Pflügers Arch - Eur J Physiol 444, 452–456 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00424-002-0820-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00424-002-0820-2