Abstract
Surgical resections of selected human brain areas to ameliorate intractable epilepsy provide opportunities to isolate, maintain, and examine nonmalignant human neural cells in vitro. Since these specimens tend to be from patients of early adulthood or older, neurons do not survive the isolation process; the cells extracted are thus of glial origin, and include oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and microglial cells. In our laboratories, although the biopsy materials (frontal or temporal lobes and corpus callosum) are mostly from subjects undergoing surgery to treat intractable epilepsy, we have not found any differences in properties of cells from such surgery when compared to other types of resections, such as those used to treat vascular anomalies involving the brain. In the frontal and temporal lobe resections, tissue is removed either en bloc or by Cavitron™ ultrasonic aspiration (CUSA), which fragments the tissue into cubes of 2 mm on average. Corpus callosum tissue is always removed by CUSA.
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Yong, V.W., Antel, J.P. (1997). Culture of Glial Cells from Human Brain Biopsies. In: Fedoroff, S., Richardson, A. (eds) Protocols for Neural Cell Culture. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2586-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2586-5_11
Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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