Protocol to culture human microglia
October 2016
Northwestern University, Chicago, USA
Microglia are the resident macrophages of the central nervous system. They are immune cells and have a wide range of physiological functions. Our current knowledge of this cell type relies mainly on rodent models, but differences in biological features with human samples have shown the need to obtain reliable techniques to use human microglia in in vitro studies. The main limitation for this is that currently there is no protocol that offers the opportunity to maintain human microglia in culture for a long time and for a high number of passages. To solve this, in this study a new protocol is developed based on the use of several growth factors that overcomes this limitation. The cells maintained their features and functions even in high passage numbers. Also, cultured human microglia was responsive to different activators. Additionally, microglia from Alzheimer's disease brains showed the same characteristics as from normal brains. The researchers propose a new method to be able to reliably culture microglia for long-term and high passages, which will give the opportunity to investigators to extend the mechanistic studies in human microglia from different patient profiles.
Postmortem adult human microglia proliferate in culture to high passage and maintain their response to amyloid-β
Changiz Geula
Added on: 08-23-2021
[1] https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad160394[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
