Figure 5.

The results of the tube formation assay. We applied a tube formation assay to investigate whether HSPA4 promoted the angiogenesis ability of HUVECs. The cell growth morphologies of HUVECs transfected with empty pcDNA3.1 construct (a, control set) or with HSPA4 expression construct (b, HSPA4 set). (c,d) AngioTool analyzed the cell growth morphology and marked the vessels (the thick red lines), highlighted the junctions (the light blue points), and depicted the outlines of vessels (the thin orange lines). (e) By analyzing 12 pictures from four independent assays (four independent assays/wells * three pictures), we evaluated the angiogenesis ability by comparing these values. For simplicity, the values in the control set were normalized as one. Data was presented as the mean ± S.D. *** and **** denoted p-value < 0.001 and p-value < 0.0001, respectively.