Read Chapter 10, Barker. Tissue culture is the art of maintaining and growing living cells or tissues in a controlled artificial environment. Generally, researchers got to watch them die. Now, we can maintain not only tumor cells, but also normal cells outside the body. Glass dishes that had to be sterilized and rooms that had to be steamed to reduce flying spores, have given way to the disposable, precoated pastic and laminar flow hoods, which we will use in this laboratory.
Tissue culture has numerous applications.
As mentioned before, tissue culture had its origins in the desire of researchers to study the cells themselves- how they grow, what stimulates or inhibits them, what they require, how or if they senesce. Now, the cultured cells are used instead of animals by researchers studying physiological processes such as cell differentiation, modulation of cell cycle or factors that control gene expression. Early developmental processes occur unimpeded in vitro. In addition, in vitro techniques are being used on a clinical levels, to create artificial skin products for burn victims, to propagate a burn victim's own epithelium, or to grow an person's own cartilage cells for transplantation. Primary tissue culture involves maintaining normal cells or tissues that are obtained from a living source, in an in vitro system.