ABSTRACT
Tissue culture is defi ned as the growth of tissues and/or cells separate from an organism. The terms tissue culture and cell culture are today used interchangeably, although cell culture has been defi ned as the process by which cells are grown under controlled conditions in a laboratory setting. As early as 1882, scientists were attempting to culture tissues ex vivo (in an artifi cial environment outside a living organism). The fi rst recorded undertaking was achieved by Sydney Ringer, a British clinician and pharmacologist who developed a saline solution, Ringer’s solution, which allowed for the explanted culture of a beating frog heart. Interestingly, Ringer’s Solution is still used today in many physiology laboratories. In 1885 a German zoologist, Wilhem Roux, cultured a portion of the medullary (neural) plate from a chicken embryo in saline successfully for several days, thus establishing the basics of tissue culture. In 1907 a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Ross Granville Harrison (see Focus Box 6.1), successfully cultured frog neural tube explants in a frog lymph hanging drop tissue (cell) culture (inverted suspension cell culture) system he had adapted from microbiologists studying bacteria. He watched the development of frog nerve fi bers from the neurons
in the explanted tissue. He had overcome the persistent problems of culture medium, observation limitations and contamination faced by other researchers to establish a relatively long-term culture system. His work was published in 1910 in the Journal of Experimental Zoology (Harrison, R., 1910). During the years immediately following this discovery tissue culture use and technology refi nement blossomed and began to be used extensively in university and biotechnology research as well as industrial manufacturing (Figure 6.1). Considered a simple cell culture technique by today’s standards, it opened the door to cell culture as a critical avenue for producing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, vaccines and cell-produced drugs. In addition, the plethora of scientifi c data and information gleaned over the past 100 years regarding cellular mechanisms for growth, differentiation and plasticity have come from tissue culture studies. Notably, the hanging drop tissue culture technique is still used today to study, for example, embryonic stem cell differentiation through embryoid body (3D aggregates of embryonic stem cells) formation (Figure 6.2).
