Passaging Human Neural Stem Cells

Summary

The ability to manipulate human neural stem/precursor cells (hNSPCs) in vitro allows to investigate their utility as cell transplants for therapeutic purposes and to explore human neural development. This protocol presents a method of culturing and passaging hNSPCs in hopes of increasing reproducibility of human stem cell research.

Abstract

The ability to manipulate human neural stem/precursor cells (hNSPCs) in vitro provides a means to investigate their utility as cell transplants for therapeutic purposes as well as to explore many fundamental processes of human neural development and pathology. This protocol presents a simple method of culturing and passaging hNSPCs in hopes of standardizing this technique and increasing reproducibility of human stem cell research. The hNSPCs we use were isolated from cadaveric postnatal brain cortices by the National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource and grown as adherent cultures on flasks coated with fibronectin (Palmer et al., 2001; Schwartz et al., 2003). We culture our hNSPCs in a DMEM:F12 serum-free media supplemented with EGF, FGF, and PDGF and passage them 1:2 approximately every seven days. Using these conditions, the majority of the cells in the culture maintain a bipolar morphology and express markers of undifferentiated neural stem cells (such as nestin and sox2).

Protocol

Note: For routine culturing of our hNSPCs, we change 50-100% of the media every other day and usually passage them 1:2 once a week. The culture media contains 20% BIT-9500, 1X antibiotic/antimycotic, and growth factors (EGF, FGF, and PDGF each at 40 ng/ml) in DMEM:F12 base media. Preparing the Coated Flask and Dissociating the Cells To prepare new flasks for the passaged cells, coat T25 flasks with 10 µg/ml human fibronectin in EMEM for 4 hours, or overnight, in a 37&d…

Discussion

We have found that this protocol provides reliable cultures of hNSPCs. One critical factor for our cells is that they need to be kept as fairly dense cultures and cannot be passaged to the point that the cells are sparse. In our hands, sparse cultures grow very slowly or completely cease dividing. For this reason, we usually split our cultures 1:2 or 1:3 when a culture is extremely dense. Coating the surface of a culture dish with fibronectin is important since it promotes good cell attachment and migration, but, unl…

Materials

Material Name	Type	Company	Catalogue Number	Comment
BIT-9500 (BSA, Insulin, Transferrin)	Reagent	Stem Cell Technologies	09500
Antibiotic-Antimycotic	Reagent	Invitrogen	15240-062
DMEM:F12 (1X)	Reagent	Invitrogen	11330-032
EMEM (1X)	Reagent	Mediatech	MT-10-010-CV	Distributed by Fisher under the indicated catalog #
Fetal Bovine Serum	Reagent	Invitrogen	10437-028
FGF, human basic recombinant	Reagent	Peprotech	100-18B
PDGF-AB	Reagent	Peprotech	100-00AB
EGF, human recombinant	Reagent	BD Biosciences	CB40052	Distributed by Fisher under the indicated catalog #
Cell Culture Flask, 25 cm2	Tool	Corning	10-126-28	Distributed by Fisher under the indicated catalog #
Fibronectin, human, natural	Reagent	BD Biosciences	CB40008A	Distributed by Fisher under the indicated catalog #
Human Neural Stem/Precursor Cells	Cells	National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource http://www.nhnscr.org/default.htm
Cell Dissociation Buffer	Reagent	Invitrogen	13150-016