Abstract
Since Lewis tried to cultuer hepatic endothelium, several authors had reported the in vitro culture of animal endothelium. However, the successive culturing for long time was not performed except by Kitsukawa or Pomerat et al. The author tried to culture the rabbits aortic endothelium in vitro over a year. 0.2% trypsin solution was adopted to gather the endothelial cells from aortic wall. The cells were cultured by 10% fetal calf serum in Eagle medium, and the 8 times “cloning” were done to get a pure strain of the endothelium.
1. Cultured endotheliums were asteroid or short fusiform in shape at early stage and changed their shape gradually to fibroblast-like long fusiform types.
2. Fibroblasts were also cultured by the same method from rabbits aortic adventitia as the control for cultured endothelium.
3. Electron-microscopically, endothelial cells had terminal bars in junctional complex, pinocytotic vesicles and band-like microfilaments which were seen also in human endotheliums.
4. The results of C. P. E. test (cytopathic effect test) showed different natures between cultured endothelium and fibroblast (TABLE 1).
5. Enzymologically, the cultured endothelium showed marked fibrinolytic activitied which were estimated about 4-5 times greater than that of cultured fibroblast.
