UC Irvine

Studying synapse formation, maintenance, and plasticity in adaptation to developmental and pathological changes is critical in our understanding of cellular mechanisms of biological processes and disease states. However, a major barrier in getting cell-type-specific detail information in these studies is the complexity of in vivo environment in high-density tissue or organs, such as spinal cord, that is packed with different types of cells, connecting tissues and structural components. In this chapter, we describe a co-culture system in which dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons and spinal cord neurons are cultured in separate compartments without culture medium diffusion between compartments, but allowing sensory neuron axons to outgrowth to adjacent chambers to establish synaptic connections with dendrites of spinal cord neurons. This provides an in vitro environment that mimics the in vivo synaptogenic environment between sensory neurons and spinal cord neurons and enables manipulation of specific neuronal populations and studying their detail contribution to synaptic formation, maintenance, and plastic changes.