In several cardiac disease states, alterations in myocyte and extracellular matrix (ECM) structure occur with left ventricular (LV) remodeling and are associated with changes in matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity. Although nonmyocyte cell types have been implicated as sites for synthesis and expression of MMPs within the ECM, whether the LV myocyte itself expresses specific types and activ...

Development of generic differentiation protocols that function in a range of independently-derived human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines remains challenging due to considerable diversity in culture methods practiced between lines. Maintenance of BG01 and HUES-7 has routinely been on mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder layers using manual- and trypsin-passaging, respectively. We adapted bot...

In the context of a cellular therapy for diabetes, methods for pancreatic progenitor expansion and subsequent differentiation into insulin-producing beta cells would be extremely valuable. Here we establish three-dimensional culture conditions in Matrigel that enable the efficient expansion of dissociated mouse embryonic pancreatic progenitors. By manipulating the medium composition we generate...

introduction: while human endothelial progenitor cells (epcs) have been a subject of somehow extensive investigation, epcs from adult mouse hematopoietic system were poorly studied. present investigation is focused on fvb mouse endothelial progenitor cells in terms of their isolation, purification, and expansion. materials and methods: mononuclear cells collected from murine peripheral blood we...

BACKGROUND Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is a highly invasive neoplasm. Epidermal growth factor (EGF) and its receptor are over expressed in pancreatic cancer, and expression correlates with invasion and metastasis. We hypothesized that EGF receptor and integrin signalling pathways interact in mediating cellular adhesion and invasion in pancreatic cancer, and that invasiveness correlates temporally...

Invadopodia are membrane protrusions that facilitate matrix degradation and cellular invasion. Although lipids have been implicated in several aspects of invadopodia formation, the contributions of de novo fatty acid synthesis and lipogenesis have not been defined. Inhibition of acetyl-CoA carboxylase 1 (ACC1), the committed step of fatty acid synthesis, reduced invadopodia formation in Src-tra...

Autotaxin [ATX (NPP-2)], originally isolated as a tumor motility-stimulating protein, has recently been shown to augment tumor aggressiveness. Specifically, atx-transfected, ras-transformed NIH3T3 cell lines have been shown to be more invasive, tumorigenic, and metastatic than mock-transfected ras-transformed control cells. In addition, the atx-transfected ras-transformed cell lines appeared to...