Ovine fetuses from slaughterhouses: a useful source for neural cell primary cultures

Abstract

27 A lot of evidence demonstrates that sheep could represent an experimental model to set 28 up medical procedures in a view of their application on humans. Sheep are chosen as 29 model for human biomechanical studies because their skeleton has some similarities 30 with humans. Sheep are gyrencephalic so the cerebral cortex can show valuable 31 signposts to identify particular cortical regions, unlike rats that are lissencephalic 32 animals. The aim of this work was to set up sheep primary cultures from ovine fetuses 33 at different ages, from pregnant uteri retrieved at local abattoirs. Cell characterization 34 demonstrated that one cell population was immunopositive to GFAP and identifiable as 35 astrocytes, whereas a second cell type was III β-tubulin-positive, and hence classified as 36 neurons. A 60 day old fetus is suitable to obtain neurons, whereas in a 90 day old fetus 37 the cell culture is predominantly characterized by glial cells. The procedure here 38 proposed is inexpensive. Indeed, the fetuses casually found during sheep slaughtering 39 have no cost, unlike the classical experimental animals, such as mice, rats, rabbits, that 40 require very high economical efforts. Finally, our protocol fully eliminates the need of 41 animal killing, being living animals replaced by a validated in vitro model in agreement 42 with the 3Rs statement. 43 44 45 46