Background. The heart consists of various kinds of cell components. However, it has not been feasible to separately analyze the\r\ngene expression of individual components. The laser microdissection (LMD) method, a new technology to collect target cells from\r\nthe microscopic regions, has been used for malignancies. We sought to establish a method to selectively collect the muscular and\r\nvascular regions fromthe heart sections and to compare the marker gene expressions with this method.Methods and Results. Frozen\r\nleft ventricle sections were obtained fromWistar-Kyoto rats (WKY) and stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR-SP) at\r\n24 weeks of age. Using the LMD method, themuscular and vascular regions were selectively collected under microscopic guidance.\r\nReal-time RT-PCR analysis showed that brain-type natriuretic peptide (BNP), a marker of cardiac myocytes, was expressed in the\r\nmuscular samples, but not in the vascular samples, whereas a-smooth muscle actin, a marker of smooth muscle cells, was detected\r\nonly in the vascular samples.Moreover, SHR-SP had significantly greater BNP upregulation than WKY (P < 0.05) in the muscular\r\nsamples. Conclusions. The LMD method enabled us to separately collect the muscular and vascular samples from myocardial\r\nsections and to selectively evaluate mRNA expressions of the individual tissue component.
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