Fig. 1

Breast tumors release endothelial cells from mural cell inhibition and downregulate mural cell Cx43. vSMC and GFP-HUVEC a or HBVP and GFP-HBMEC b were plated alone or in co-culture overnight in normal growth media, then cultured in control media (‘Mock’) or media conditioned by MDA-MB-231 cells (‘231’) or MCF10A cells (‘10A’). At the end of four days, fluorescence was quantified. Data shown are representative of three experiments performed in duplicate or triplicate (**p < 0.01; ***p = 0.001). c Western analysis of indicated endothelial or mural cells starved overnight then stimulated for 24 h with control media (‘Mock’) or media conditioned by tumor cells (‘231’) and are representative of at least 2–4 replicate experiments for each cell line. d Quantification of Cx43 protein levels compared in vSMC and HBVP treated for 24 h with media conditioned by MDA-MB-231 tumor cells or control mock media normalized to tubulin levels (n = 6 different vSMC donor lots; *** p < 0.001; for HBVP n = 3 independent experiments with 2 different donor lots; *p < 0.05)