title: Biomechanical Phenotyping of the Murine Aorta: What Is the Best Control?
abstract: The availability of diverse mouse models is revealing increasingly greater information on arterial mechanics, including homeostatic adaptations and pathologic maladaptations to genetic, pharmacological, and surgical manipulations. Fundamental to understanding such biomechanical changes, however, is reliable information on appropriate control vessels. In this paper, we contrast 15 different geometrical and mechanical metrics of biaxial wall mechanics for the ascending aorta across seven different types of possible control mice. We show that there is a comforting similarity across these multiple controls for most, though not all, metrics. In particular, three potential controls, namely, noninduced conditional mice, exhibit higher values of distensibility, an important clinical metric of structural stiffness, and two of these potential controls also have higher values of intrinsic circumferential material stiffness. There is motivation, therefore, to understand better the biomechanical changes that can arise with noninduced Cre-lox or similar approaches for generating mutations conditionally. In cases of germline mutations generated by breeding heterozygous +/- mice, however, the resulting homozygous +/+ mice tend to exhibit properties similar to traditional (C57BL/6) controls.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bellini
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.
authors.forename: A W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Caulk
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520; Vascular Biology and Therapeutics Program, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tellides
authors.affiliation: Fellow ASME Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, 55 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520; Vascular Biology and Therapeutics Program, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520 e-mail: jay.humphrey@yale.edu.
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Humphrey
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001011:Aorta; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D051379:Mice; D010641:Phenotype; D013314:Stress, Mechanical