“…Primary microglia cultured on conventional tissue culture plates represent a simple alternative to study response to disease-relevant stimuli, however gene expression profiling identified an epigenetically-driven loss of microglia identity gene expression within hours of transfer to culture plates (Gosselin et al, 2017 ). In contrast organotypic brain slice cultures derived from primary mouse tissue preserve tissue architecture important for microglia physiological phenotypes and offer the advantage of a tissue-relevant context that have yielded important insights into neuroinflammatory processes (Czapiga and Colton, 1999 ; Bernardino, 2005 ; Lossi et al, 2009 ; Vinet et al, 2012 ; Hellwig et al, 2015 ; Masuch et al, 2016a ; Saliba et al, 2017 ; Yousif et al, 2018 ; Araki et al, 2019 ; Croft et al, 2019a ; Richter et al, 2019 ; Sheppard et al, 2019 ). Analogous studies with rat organotypic brain slice cultures have also provided valuable insights regarding the role of microglia during inflammation (Mitrasinovic et al, 2001 ; Schermer and Humpel, 2002 ; Ding and Li, 2008 ; Hall et al, 2009 ; Benakis et al, 2010 ; Jung et al, 2013 ; Nam et al, 2013 ; Lutz et al, 2015 ; Ramírez-Sánchez et al, 2015 ; Papageorgiou et al, 2016 ; Chong et al, 2018 ; Magalhães et al, 2018 ).…”