A few papers (attached) have co-cultured human brain cells with mice BV2 cells. I am wondering as to the validity of any study employing such tactics. My initial thoughts when hearing of this is extreme skepticism as surely the human cells would activate the microglial macrophage-like response. This in turn creates a confounding variable that would be too hard to ignore. I am not interested in the general view of such experiments by the wider community as I am considering such a co-culturing experiment myself.
Dear Piers,
Such experiments have been tried in stem cell types also between human and rat cells where after a co culture experiment, animal cells started expressing some human proteins and that was demonstrated by some antibody based assay and the same is published in Dec 2014 issue of stem cell and development. So yes, these type of experiments are valid. But to be more on precautionary side what I can suggest you is to label the cells with GFP/RFP or whatever tag you find suitable and then observe the coculture because in that case if their is any of the adverse response or cell death occurs you can directly obserbrve under microscope. Hope it helps !
Hello Dear,
please have a look on the link below...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25242642
Cheers !
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