Isolation of human explant derived cardiac stem cells from cryopreserved heart tissue
Fig 4
Effects of tissue cryopreservation on scar size, transplanted cell retention and transplanted cell fate.
(A) Representative images (left panel) and quantitative analysis (right panels) demonstrating that tissue cryopreservation had no discernable effect on the ability of transplanted EDCs to reduce left ventricular scar sizes (mean ± SEM, n = 4–5 animals per group with 3 histological slides analyzed per animal, scale bar 1000 μm). (B) Quantitative PCR for retained human alu sequences and histological analysis for human nuclear antigen positive (HNA+) cells demonstrating that cryopreservation had no effect on transplanted EDCs engraftment (mean ± SEM, n = 5–6 animals per group). (C) Representative images of immunohistochemical sections used for peri-infarct field quantification of cell engraftment and co-localization with markers of cardiac myocyte (cTNT, upper panel), smooth muscle (αSMA, middle panel) and endothelial (vWF, lower panel) lineage (scale bar 50 μm). Arrows indicate examples of HNA co-segregation with lineage markers while arrow heads indicate HNA staining alone. Histological analysis demonstrating the co-segregation between HNA+ cells and markers of transplanted cell lineage commitment (mean ± SEM, n = 6 animals per group).