Tissue hypoxia is a common pathophysiological process. Since 1990s, numerous studies have focused on investigating cellular adaptation to experimental hypoxia. A modular incubator chamber made of solid materials has frequently been used in the experiments that require hypoxic conditions. Here, we introduce a novel and inflatable chamber for hypoxia experiments. In experiments detecting hypoxia-induced accumulation of hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (HIF-1α) and hypoxia-induced expression of HIF-1-regulated genes, the new chamber yielded reproducible and comparable results as the modular incubator chamber did. The new chamber did not create inner chamber pressure during its use. Other properties of the new chamber were low-cost, easy to use, and leakage-free. Moreover, the size of the new chamber was adjustable, and the smaller one could be placed onto an inverted microscope for real-time studies. The successful examples of real-time studies included the real-time recording of GFP-HIF-1α fusion nuclear translocation and endothelial cell tubular formation.
Keywords: Cell culture; hypoxia; hypoxia chamber; hypoxia-inducible factor 1.