HUVECs cultured under normal or high laminar shear stress

Many studies have characterised the effect of normal laminar shear stress (LSS) on endothelial responses, however elevated shear stress, as would be experienced overlying a stenotic plaque, has not been studied in depth. Therefore we used transcriptomics and related functional analyses to compare cells exposed to laminar shear stress at 15 or 75 dynes/cm2 for 24 hours (LSS15-normal or LSS75-high shear stress). Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC n=4 per flow condition from different batches of pooled donor HUVEC p2) were cultured for 24 hours on gelatin coated slides under laminar shear stress of either 15 dynes/cm2 or 75 dynes/cm2 (LSS15 or LSS75) to assess the effect of high shear stress on endothelial cells. Total RNA was obtained using Qiagen kit and array analysis performed by Service XS (Leiden, Netherlands).