Regulation of cardiac beta-adrenergic receptors during hypoxia and ischemia is an area of active investigation, with some investigators reporting an increase in sarcolemmal beta-receptor number after ischemia. Previous studies have been limited by the necessity of examining beta-adrenergic receptor properties in membrane preparations from hypoxic or ischemic cardiac tissue and drawing conclusions about receptor localization in intact tissue from the behavior of a fraction of total receptors in membrane populations. As an approach to examining beta-receptor properties under well-defined pathophysiological conditions in intact heart cells, we studied cell-surface beta-receptors and adenylate cyclase activity in intact cultured chick embryo ventricular cells under conditions of controlled hypoxia and reoxygenation. During 2 h of hypoxia (PO2 less than 1.5 Torr) there was a progressive decline in cell surface beta-receptors from 26 +/- 2 to 10 +/- 6 fmol/mg (P less than 0.003) with no change in antagonist or agonist affinity. Receptor number recovered fully during 2 h of reoxygenation. Basal adenosine 3',5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP) production was unchanged, but response to isoproterenol in the absence or presence of a phosphodiesterase inhibitor decreased to about half of the response for normoxic cells but fully recovered during reoxygenation in a pattern similar to that for receptor number. Although [ATP] declined significantly during hypoxia (from 35 to 25 nmol/mg), the decline in [GTP] was marginal (4.3 to 3.9 nmol/mg), making it unlikely that substrate for guanine nucleotide regulatory protein was limiting for beta-adrenergic signal transduction.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)