Cell types and their differing adhesion

In the animal body, of course most of the cells stick to one another to form solid tissues and organs. The cells of one particular tissue, blood, are derived from stem cells in the haemopoietic tissue but are non-adhesive for the majority of their short, mature lives. Thus, blood was an early subject for calorimetric study, largely by some of the clinical scientists in Lund, the city that is the spiritual home of the LKB/Thermometric calorimeters. In the early days when batch vessels had no stirrers and were only rotated, the cells were pumped through a flow calorimeter because sedimentation in batch vessels caused the crowding effect (see Section 3.2.1) due to the onset of anoxic conditions. 

Whole blood has rarely been examined (but see References [89,90]) and most of the investigations have been on various fractions of blood tissue, including cells purified as single types. As such, they are covered in a separate Chapter by Monti in this Volume and are only considered in this chapter to illustrate certain generic points. The rest of Section 5 is devoted to cells from tissues other than blood and includes the one non-adhesive normal type of cell apart from the blood cells, that is the gamete. This area of research has been reviewed several times over the years by Kemp (see References [4,9-11,16]). 

As briefly mentioned earlier in this chapter (see Section 3.1.1), several different strategies have been adopted for obtaining data for the heat production of cells attached to a substratum. Human keratinocytes were grown to confluency on the collagen coated hydrophilic membrane of a Petriperm dish [96], a piece was cut out and then inserted into the chamber of a large capacity Calvet calorimeter (see Reference [3] for details of it) to record the heat production. In another approach, rabbit macrophages were grown as two-tiered monolayers in the stainless steel vessels of a Thermometric TAM calorimeter 

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