Isolated Rat Liver Needs Calcium to Make Bile

Abstract

Summary

When normal rat livers were perfused with heparinized normal rat whole blood by the Brauer et al. technique, between 10 and 15 μl of bile were excreted per minute. This amount was drastically reduced by the addition of sodium citrate to the blood. When calcium chloride was subsequently added, bile flow returned to normal if the interval between the additions of citrate and calcium was not over an hour. Magnesium chloride had no such corrective effect. Two tests of liver function, generation of factor VII and conversion of [¹⁴C]alanine to TCA-precipitable ¹⁴C, were unaffected by the addition of citrate to plasma-free perfusions.