Hypoxia exposure induces the emergence of fibroblasts lacking replication repressor signals of PKCzeta in the pulmonary artery adventitia.

Aims: Cultured fibroblasts of hypoxia-stimulated remodelled pulmonary artery (PA) adventitia proliferate at a greater rate compared with those of normal adventitia. Since protein kinase C (PKC) zeta is a replication repressor of normal adventitial fibroblasts, we hypothesized that loss of the repressor activity of PKCzeta might contribute to increased rate of proliferation in adventitial cells of remodelled PA.

Methods And Results: Isolated PA adventitial fibroblasts of neonatal control (Fib-C) and chronic hypoxia-exposed (Fib-H) calves were used to test our hypothesis.