Culture and identification of large vessel endothelial cells

Abstract

As the contents of this volume show, endothelial cells are deeply involved in many important physiologic and pathologic processes. However, up until the early 1970’s, endothelial cells could only be studied at a distance, progress in endothelial cell research was very slow, and most of what is in this book was unknown. The development in the early 1970’s of practical and routine methods for culturing endothelial cells radically altered this state of affairs and made possible almost all of the research detailed in this book. In this chapter I will review what is known about the culture and identification of endothelial cells derived from large blood vessels. Other closely related topics are discussed in separate chapters — culture of capillary endothelial cells in chapter 2, culture of neural capillary endothelial cells in chapter 3, culture of endothelial cells on microcarriers in chapter 4, endothelial cell growth factors in chapters 6 and 9, and the proliferative aspects of cultured endothelial cells in chapter 11.