Isolation and Culture of Mouse Placental Endothelial Cells

Isolation and culture of endothelial cells (ECs) is a useful tool to study the cellular processes involved in vascular development and vascular maturation. In this chapter, we describe a method to isolate and culture endothelial cells from placentae. This method takes advantage of two transgenes: ROSA26 mT/mG , which drives the expression of GFP upon Cre-mediated recombination, and Tie2-Cre, which expresses Cre driven by the Tie2 promoter in endothelial progenitors and their descendants. GFP-expressing endothelial cells are isolated through fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). The sorted cells express the endothelial marker CD31. This method can be used to study the morphological and physiological properties of placental endothelial cells in mice carrying mutations affecting vascular development.