My question is: will 3D culture with matrigel or similar products (extracts from basal membrane) increase my differentiation better than 2D monolayer cultures of epithelial cells? Based on your experience - how do epithelial cells spatially organize in a 3D matrix? My cells grow well in 2D but I get low/partial differentiation so far.
Extracellular matrix proteins can influence the characters of epithelial/endothelial cells. I used matrigel not for growing or differentiation of epithelial cells but for performing capillary tube formation/angiogenesis assay. Gelatin, rat tail collagen, fibronectin are commonly used depending on the cell type. In my experiments coating plates with rat tail collagen works best epithelial/endothelial cell cultures' growth (I use rat collagen to grow mainly human brain endothelium, primary mouse brain endothelial cultures) but I dont see any cell differentiation.
It is kind of hard to imagine a well-differentiated cell like epithelial cell or endothelial cell will differentiate further unless they are blast cells. I may be just ignorant about it but I only saw endothelial cell transform to other cell type in primary cell culture. I would like to be educated about this topic.
these could be helpfuf,
http://www.bdbiosciences.com/documents/webinar_2011_02_3D.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104620230300032X
I am dealing with the same issue, good luck!!!
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