I know that HEK293 and HEK293T cells are supposed to be human embryonic kidney cells but I have always wondered why these cells are used in studying almost every kind of neuroscience related disease. Beyond the fact that they are easy to transfect and handle, what other reasons justify their use in studies of mechanisms related to Alzheimers, Parkinsons and in general neuroscience studies? How relevant are they as models of neuronal mechanisms/pathologies?
Not sure about disease specifically, but it's my understanding that they're a good medium for hosting basic transfections - like studying ion channel function, etc. If a disease is correlated with a specific mutation, it could be that expressing the mutant in HEK cells allows it to be directly studied. You're right though, any model needs to be carefully justified and interpreted.
HEK cells are not a neuronal cell model. In fact the lack of expression of many ion channels makes them a good model for patch-clamp recordings because there are minor interfering currents (although it depends on the channel you want to study, see attached link) . That means you can study a mutant of an ion channel found in a neurological pathology and understand what is happening in the brain of the patient carrying the mutation. PC12 cells are a neuronal cell model, but they need to be grown with special growth factors to get them to differentiate. Neuronal primary cultures are an other model.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15979128
It is simple the ease with which these cells are transfected for transient expression studies, and the robustness of the expression of alien proteins, in some cases against a null background.
Dear Samuel:
There are many reasons for the wide use of HEK 293 cells in neurological research, some of which have been highlighted already be others. The first and the most important reason is that they are easy to handle, grow rapidly, can be readily transfected and are amenable to stringent quantitative assessments. Keep in mind that they are widely used not only for neurobiological studies but also for more general biological experiments. Secondly, developmentally HEK293 cells and neurons originate from the same precursor line; this means that the fundamental biological processes and their regulatory mechanisms (i.e. transcription, translation, protein folding and trafficking and so on) are quite similar but not identical. As such, HEK293 cells provide a reasonable approximation for addressing numerous questions of basic biology also relevant to neurons. Thirdly, HEK293 cells are devoid of several key proteins which play critical role in the biology of neurons, e.g. ion channels, receptors, enzymes, chaperons and so on. As such, they provide a perfect low 'noise' natural model for studying the biology and physiology of these proteins. Finally, and also very importantly, their accessibility for patch-clamping (smooth membrane, compactness and cell size/capacitance) makes them suitable for drug screening and assessment of the biophysical and pharmacological characteristics of ion channels and receptors.
Thanks for the post,
Saak
Thank you all for your responses. This had been quite illuminating; I now know why if I have to use these cells. Thanks once again.
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