USE OF ORGAN CULTURE

Organ culture have applications in pathology, e.g., for comparative, developmental, and diagnostic studies of tissues from normal and diseased donors, for investigations on carcinogenesis, somatic cell genetic variation, viral susceptibility, etc.

  Organ culture is used principally for:--
  (1) The maintenance of structural organization in tissues which are to be subjected to experimentally varied environments (e.g., to hormones, drugs, or radiation);
 (2) The study of morphogenesis, differentiation, and function in excised organs or presumptive organs; and
 (3) for comparison of the growth and behavior of explanted organs with the growth and behavior of similar organs in situ.
 In organ cultures, whole embryonic organs or small tissue fragments are cultured in vitro in such a manner that they retain their tissue architecture. In contrast, cell cultures are obtained either by enzymatic or mechanical dispersal of tissues into individual cells or by spontaneous migration of cells from explants; they are maintained as attached monolayers or as cell suspensions.

TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURE FOR ORGAN CULTURE IN BRIEF
In order to optimize the nutrient and gas exchanges, the tissues are kept at gas limited interface using the support material which ranges from semisolid gel of agar, clotted plasma, micropore filter, lens paper, or strips of Perspex or plexiglass. The organ cultures can also be grown on top of a stainless steel grid. Another popular choice for growing organ cultures is the filter-well inserts. Filter-well inserts with different materials like ceramic, collagen, nitrocellulose are now commercially available. Filter well inserts have been successfully used to develop functionally integrated thyroid epithelium, stratified epidermis, intestinal epithelium, and renal epithelium.

The procedure for organ cultures has the following steps:
(a) The organ tissue is collected after the dissection.
(b) The size of the tissue is reduced to less than 1mm in thickness.
(c) The tissue is placed on a gas medium interface support.
(d) Incubation in a CO2 incubator.
(e) M199 or CMRL 1066 medium is used and changed frequently.
(f) The techniques of histology, autoradiography, and immunochemistry are used to study the organ cultures.