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Establishment and assessment of a simple and easily reproducible incision model of spinal cord neuron cells in vitro

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Abstract

A growing number of in vitro models have been introduced to study the mechanisms of spinal cord injury. A potential drawback of these models is that they are difficult to reproduce. In this study, an in vitro incision model was established using primary cultured neuronal cells from fetal rat spinal cords. The neurons were subjected to incision in a simple and reproducible way. To assess whether this model could simulate the responses of spinal cord neuron cells in vivo after a spinal cord transection, apoptosis, and the expression of immediate early genes were detected in the neurons at various time points after injury. The results indicated that: (1) significantly more terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling-positive cells were observed at 1, 3, and 7 d following injury and (2) the expression of both c-Jun and c-Fos was induced 10 min after incision and had markedly higher levels 2 h post-injury. These results suggested that our model can partially imitate the responses of in vivo neuronal cells after a spinal cord transection and such models may facilitate further understanding of biochemical and cellular events associated with spinal cord injury.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from Chinese National Basic Research Program (grant no. 2009CB918301) and Open Project Program of the State Key Laboratory of Proteomics (SKLP2010yx-004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Proteomics, Department of Neurobiology, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Haiping Que, Yong Liu, Yufeng Jia & Shaojun Liu

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  1. Haiping Que
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  2. Yong Liu
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  3. Yufeng Jia
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  4. Shaojun Liu
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Correspondence to Yong Liu.

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Editor: T. Okamoto

Haiping Que and Yong Liu contributed equally

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Que, H., Liu, Y., Jia, Y. et al. Establishment and assessment of a simple and easily reproducible incision model of spinal cord neuron cells in vitro. In Vitro Cell.Dev.Biol.-Animal 47, 558–564 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11626-011-9443-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11626-011-9443-2

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