Fig. 3

Effects of acyclic retinoid (ACR) and angiotensin-II receptor blocker (ARB) on vascular endothelial growth. a Relative mRNA expression levels of rat Vegfa (Upper panel) and Pecam1 (Lower panel) in the liver of experimental rats. b Recombinant human insulin (rh-insulin)-stimulated cell proliferation in human umbilical vascular endothelial cell (HUVEC) at different concentration. Cell proliferation is indicated as ratio to the data of 0μU. c The effects of ACR and/or ARB on the proliferation of HUVEC cultured under the insulin resistance(IR)-mimetic condition. The cells as control were cultured under normal condition. d The effects of ACR and/or ARB on the relative mRNA expression levels of human VEGFA (Upper panel) and PECAM1 (Lower panel) in HUVEC cultured under the IR-mimetic condition. e The effects of ACR and/or ARB on in vitro endothelial tubular formation (Left panel; representative pictures, Right panel; Semi-quantitative analysis). LETO; Long-Evans Tokushima Otsuka rat, OLETF; Otsuka Long-Evans Tokushima Fatty rat. Relative mRNA expression levels were measured by quantitative RT–PCR (qRT–PCR), and GAPDH was used as internal control for qRT–PCR (a, d). The IR-mimetic condition is defined as the higher concentration of D-(+)-glucose (199.6 mg/dl) and rh-insulin (33.2 μU/ml) (c-e). ACR (10 μM) and/or ARB (10 μM) were added to each group for in vitro experiments (c-e). Data are mean ± SD (n = 10). *, P ≤ 0.01; **, P ≤ 0.05 between each group