细胞技术

During the process of characterizing the structure and function of novel antigens, it is usually necessary to create new monoclonal or polyclonal antibody reagents. However, once validated, these antibodies can be put to a multitude of experimental uses, such as detecting and quantitat ...

Culture of isolated microglia from dissociated cortical tissue has promoted the in vitro study of microglial function and morphological characteristics (Giulian and Baker, 1986; Streit and Kincaid-Colton, 1995). However, cultures prepared in this manner demonstrate charact ...

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to standard procedures for quantifying the number of neural cells in microcultures. The chick embryo was chosen as the source of neural cells, because embryos can be conveniently grown in an inexpensive laboratory incubator, in large, repl ...

This chapter focuses on the application of multiple-well plate technology to biological assays for neuroactive or other agents. It does not attempt to address specific cell types, culture systems, or individual assays for neurotoxicity, neural cell differentiation, or other applic ...

The ability to grow primary neurons under serum-free conditions is facilitating better control in studies of neuronal development, mechanisms of neuronal signaling, electrophysiology, pharmacology, plasticity, in vitro growth requirements, gene expression, and neuroto ...

Cell adhesion, cell contact, and intercellular interactions are critical to neuronal function. Neuronal cell surfaces are closely associated with the surfaces of other cells, including the specialized contacts of synapses, and the close appositions of astrocytes, oligodendro ...

Advances in molecular virology, and in understanding the molecular basis of human disease, has led to intensive efforts to use viruses for delivering therapeutic genes to cells. Although gene therapy (GT) to treat disease is still in its infancy, the techniques developed for gene delivery to c ...

The availability, in the past three decades, of well-characterized and immortalized neural cell lines has led to a rapid expansion of knowledge in many aspects of neurobiology. The major advantages of cell lines are that they are capable of long-term or indefinite growth, and generally repres ...

Aggregating brain cell cultures are primary, three-dimensional cell cultures consisting of even-sized, spherical structures that are maintained in suspension by constant gyratory agitation. Because of the avidity of freshly dissociated embryonic cells to attach to their cou ...

Over the past few years, the view that little or no cell turnover or replacement takes place within the adult central nervous system (CNS) has changed dramatically. The adult brain of both rodents and primates has been shown to embody undifferentiated, mitotically active precursor cells that a ...

Over the past several years, neuroscientists have developed a considerable interest in a glial cell found only in the first cranial nerve. These glial cells, which are referred to as “olfactory ensheath-ing cells,” provide ensheathment for the unmyelinated axons of the olfactory nerve (Do ...

Several distinct stages of differentiation have been described for the oligodendroglial lineage in vitro (Gard and Pfeiffer, 1990; Gard et al., 1995). These include the actively proliferating bipolar or tripolar oligodendroglial precursor cell, characterized by the presence of G ...

In complex tissues such as the central nervous system, differentiation and functional activity often require temporally and spatially dynamic epigenetic cues that cannot be reproduced in dissociated cell cultures. Organotypic cultures and, among them, hippocampal slice cult ...

Surgical resections of selected human brain areas, to ameliorate intractable epilepsy, provide opportunities to isolate, maintain, and examine nonmalignant human neural cells in vitro. Because these specimens tend to be from patients of early adulthood or older, neurons do not survi ...

In vitro assays are important tools for investigating how the intricate network of neuronal connections is established during brain development. We have been using different in vitro systems to study the cellular strategies involved in the formation of neuronal projections between ...

The telomeric poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP), tankyrase 1, modulates the impact of telomerase inhibition on human cancer cells. Thus, overexpression of tankyrase 1 in telomerase-positive cancer cells confers resistance to telomerase inhibitors, such as MST-312, whereas ph ...

More than 85% of human cancers and over 70% of immortalized human cell lines have highly elevated telomerase activity. In contrast, telomerase activity is down-regulated in most human adult somatic cells, except stem cells and germ cells. These results are consistent with telomerase confe ...

Constitutive activation of the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase signaling pathway by oncogenic stimulation is widespread in human cancers. With the recently demonstrated links between MAP kinase, histone phosphorylation, gene transcription factors, and hTERT gene p ...

Shortening of telomeres prevents cells from uncontrolled proliferation. Progressive telomere shortening occurs at each cell division until a critical telomeric length is reached. Telomerase expression is switched off after embryonic differentiation in most normal cells, ...

Genetic experiments using a dominant-negative form of human telomerase (DN-hTERT) demonstrated that telomerase inhibition can result in telomeric shortening followed by proliferation arrest and cell death by apoptosis. Neoplastic cells from telomerase RNA null (mTERC−/−) mi ...