cardiomyocytes primary culture - (Jun/26/2010 )

hi. i just read several papers mentioning isolating around 80 mouse hearts for primary culture. The mouse are crossed with a reporter strain so that the specific heart cell can be isolated by flow cytometry. why do they have to isolate so many mouse hearts? haha sorry i dont understand and is new to mouse genetics

I'm guessing the cells are very low abundance/don't survive very well, so they needed a lot of hearts to get the specific type of cell they wanted. Either that or they just needed a lot of cells for something and it was easier to get them straight from the heart that it was to culture the cells.

oh i see.. thank you.. but its possible right? haha i just found it so strange and very tedious work thanks

I do work with mouse hearts to isolate specific heart cells and, even if is true that these cell sare very low abundance/don't survive very well, I have never used so many mouse!!!
Usually I am not going higher that 5 mice!
Now I am curious to read these papers!