Abstract
We describe here a method to obtain primary cell cultures from the cerebral cortex and the hypothalamus of bovine fetuses. We report how tissue origin, developmental stages, and culture medium conditions influence cell differentiation and the prevalence of glial cells vs. neurons. We compare explants from early, middle, and late stages of development and two different fetal calf serum concentrations (1 and 10%) to identify the best conditions to obtain and grow viable astrocytes in culture. In addition, we describe how to cryopreserve and obtain viable cortical astrocytes from frozen fetal bovine brain samples.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Dr. Livio Corain of the Department of Statistics of the University of Padua, for help with statistical analysis of data. This work was supported by the Italian Ministry for University and Research (Grants No 2002073381002 and No 60A08-3811/08).
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Ballarin, C., Peruffo, A. (2012). Primary Cultures of Astrocytes from Fetal Bovine Brain. In: Milner, R. (eds) Astrocytes. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 814. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-452-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-452-0_9
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