Abstract
The main purpose of this sophisticated and highly versatile method is to visualize and quantify structural vessel wall properties, cellular recruitment, and lipid/dextran extravasation under physiological conditions in living arteries. This will be of interest for a broad range of researchers within the field of inflammation, hypertension, atherosclerosis, and even the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, many researchers are using in vitro techniques to evaluate cellular recruitment, like transwell or flow chamber systems with cultured cells, with unclear physiological comparability. The here introduced method describes in detail the use of a sophisticated and flexible method to study arterial wall properties and leukocyte recruitment in fresh and viable murine carotid arteries ex vivo under arterial flow conditions. This model mimics the in vivo situation and allows the use of cells and arteries isolated from two different donors (for example, wildtype vs. specific knockouts) to be combined into one experiments, thereby providing information on both leukocyte and/or endothelial cell properties of both donors. As such, this model can be considered an alternative for the complicated and invasive in vivo studies, such as parabiotic experiments.