When using washed blood, fibrinogen (1.5 mg/ml) was added to facilitate aggregate adhesion. CPA samples contained 16 µM InsPs (InsP3, InsP5 or InsP6) with or without either additional 1.5 mg/ml fibrinogen, 10 µg/ml rVWF (produced as previously described [20] (link)), or 3 µg/ml human collagen type III (Southern Biotech, Biozol, Eching, Germany). After an incubation of 5 min, the samples were mixed at 10 rpm for 1 min.
For CPA, 130 µl of each sample were subjected to flow for 2 min at a defined shear rate of 720 rpm (corresponding to 1800 s−1). Subsequently, the wells were washed with PBS, stained with May-Grünwald solution (Roth, Karlsruhe, Germany) for 1 min and further analyzed with the internal image analyzer of the Impact-R device. Platelet aggregation was evaluated by examining the average size (AS) of surface-bound objects [21] .