The Cultivation of Adult Mammalian Skin Epithelium in vitro

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to describe a simple technique for the shortterm cultivation of adult mammalian skin epithelium in vitro. The conditions of cultivation are such as allow the rapid proliferation and migratory spread of skin epithelium while maintaining the characteristic functional activity and histological appearance of its cells. The technique was devised to investigate the effect of iso-antibodies on cells. It requires little, if any, modification for use as an adjunct to routine biochemistry (e.g. in studying the influence of specific metabolic inhibitors on cell movement and division: cf. Medawar, 1947), or for submitting cells to the direct action of hormones. It has the disadvantage that the cultivated cells do not grow away from the explanted tissue into the culture medium, so that the direct microscopic study of living cells (an amenity to which, in conventional tissue culture, most others have been sacrificed) must be forgone. The tissue can, however, be studied in the transformed state in which it is most familiar to histologists: in stained sections.