Immortalization of Embryonic Rat Mesencephalic Cells

Several kinds of immortalized cell lines from rodent brain have been reported. These show neuronal, glial, or bipotential properties. For the study of neural transplantation in relation to Parkinson's disease, development of immortalized dopaminergic cell lines may have the potential to provide an unlimited source of cells. Immortalized cell lines established by the introduction of temperature-sensitive oncogenes are expected to grow indefinitely at the permissive temperature. At the non-permissive temperature , such cells are expected to stop growing and may also show some differentiated properties. In the present study, a retroviral vector with a temperature sensitive form of the SV40 large T antigen was employed to develop immortalized cell lines from the rat embryonic (E12-E14) ven-tral mesencephalon. Several cell lines have been developed and some of these have been characterized by immunohistochemical analysis under several conditions.