General Description
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. Recently we have developed two additional formulations of Cultrex? BME known as Cultrex? BME Type 2 and Cultrex? BME Type 3. Cultrex? BME Type 2 provides a proprietary formulation that is higher in tensile strength when compared to our original BME, while Cultrex? BME Type 3 is physiologically aligned with the in vivo solid tumors environment and is recommended for xenografts and other in vivo applications.
