Cultrex® Basement Membrane Extract, PathClear®

Basement membranes are continuous sheets of specialized extracellular matrix that form an interface between endothelial, epithelial, muscle, or neuronal cells and their adjacent stroma. Basement membranes are degraded and regenerated during development and wound healing. They not only support cells and cell layers, but they also play an essential role in tissue organization that affects cell adhesion, migration, proliferation, and differentiation. Basement membranes provide major barriers to invasion by metastatic tumor cells.  Cultrex® Basement Membrane Extract (BME) is a soluble form of basement membrane purified from Engelbreth-Holm-Swarm (EHS) tumor. The extract gels at 37°C to form a reconstituted basement membrane. The major components of BME include laminin, collagen IV, entactin, and heparin sulfate proteoglycan.  BME can be used in a multiple applications, under a variety of cell culture conditions, for maintaining growth or promoting differentiation of primary endothelial, epithelial, smooth muscle and stem cells. BME can also be utilized in cell attachment, neurite outgrowth, angiogenesis, in vitro cell invasion and in vivo tumorigenicity assays.

Specifications:

CONCENTRATION:

12 - 18 mg/ml.

SOURCE:

Murine Engelbreth-Holm-Swarm (EHS) tumor.

STORAGE BUFFER:

Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle’s medium without phenol red, with 10 g/ml gentamicin sulfate.

STORAGE/STABILITY:

Product is stable for a minimum of 3 months from date of shipment when stored at –20°C in a manual defrost freezer. For optimal stability, store at –80°C. Avoid freeze-thaw cycles.

Material Qualification:

GELLING ASSAY:

• BME gels in less than 30 minutes at 37°C, and maintains the gelled form in culture medium for a minimum of 14 days at 37°C.

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FUNCTIONAL ASSAY:

• Tube formation assay - BME promotes formation of capillary-like structures by human (HBMVEC; HUVEC) or mouse (SVEC4-10) endothelial cells.
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STERILITY TESTING:

• PathClear® - Negative by PCR test for mycoplasma; 17 bacterial and virus strains typically included in mouse antibody production (MAP) testing, plus 13 additional murine infectious agents including LDEV, for a total of 31 organisms and viruses.
• No bacterial or fungal growth detected after incubation at 37°C for 14 days following USP sterility testing guidelines.
• Endotoxin concentration ≤ 8 EU/ml by LAL assay.

Cultrex® Basement Membrane Extract, PathClear®
Product Name	Catalog #	Size
100X Phenol Red Solution	3430-50-01	50 µl