16 Feb 2021
In the brain, complex interactions between different cell types can drive inflammation and disease. This cross talk is hard to study in vitro, because culture systems are often too simple to recapitulate the intricacies of the brain, or the mix of cells is too poorly defined to give reliable results. In the February 8 Nature Neuroscience, researchers led by Lorenz Studer at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City describe a triculture system of neurons, microglia, and astrocytes that combines pure populations of each cell type in a defined ratio. Generated from human pluripotent stem cells, each cell type can be genetically manipulated. Because the cells can be frozen in large quantities, the cultures can be readily scaled up as well.