The suitability of BV2 cells as alternative model system for primary microglia cultures or for animal experiments examining brain inflammation.
By A. Henn, Søren Lund, Maj Hedtjärn, A. Schrattenholz, P. Pörzgen, Marcel Leist. ALTEX, 2009
747 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The role of microglia in neurodegeneration, toxicology and immunity is an expanding area of biomedical research requiring large numbers of animals. Use of a microglia-like cell line would accelerate many research programmes and reduce the necessity of continuous cell preparations and animal experimentation, provided that the cell line reproduces the in vivo situation or primary microglia (PM) with high fidelity. The immortalised murine microglial cell line BV-2 has been used frequently as a substitute for PM, but recently doubts were raised as to their suitability. Here, we re-evaluated strengths and potential short-comings of BV-2 cells. Their response to lipopolysaccharide was compared with the response of microglia in vitro and in vivo. Transcriptome (480 genes) and proteome analyses after stimulation with lipopolysaccharide indicated a reaction pattern of BV-2 with many similarities to that of PM, although the average upregulation of genes was less pronounced. The cells showed a normal regulation of NO production and a functional response to IFN-gamma, important parameters for appropriate interaction with T cells and neurons. BV-2 were also able to stimulate other glial cells. They triggered the translocation of NF-kappaB, and a subsequent production of IL-6 in astrocytes. Thus, BV-2 cells appear to be a valid substitute for PM in many experimental settings, incuding complex cell-cell interaction studies.
Subfields: Immunology, Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dcf02aafaa22d97936bff2691eea490d0fa8dd1c
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In Neurology
Citations in the corpus
- ROS Generation in Microglia: Understanding Oxidative Stress and Inflammation in Neurodegenerative Disease (2020, background): “It is important to validate these responses in vivo, in carefully-isolated primary microglia and iPS-derived microglia to fully understand the role of quinone-derived compounds in neuroinflammatory regulation, especially when considering the deviance of immortalised microglia to that of primary cell”
- Microglia: biology and pathology (2009, background): “animal experiments [75], we feel that BV-2 should only be used for screening purposes with validation performed in primary cultures or, preferably, an established experimental in vivo setting.”
- Characterization of phenotype markers and neuronotoxic potential of polarised primary microglia in vitro (2013, background): “We also assessed any effects of prior activation state, to provide a way to identify how a novel compound may alter phenotype depending on the stage of injury/insult progression.”