Culturing olfactory ensheathing cells from the mouse olfactory epithelium.

Olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) are not a class of stem cell, but they are a specialized and highly plastic glial cell that can continuously support the neurogenesis and axonal regeneration of olfactory receptor neurons. Because of this, they have been transplanted into sites of spinal cord injury to test their efficacy in promoting repair. They also have been demonstrated to have some ability to support the remyelination of demyelinated axons. Although the majority of these transplantation studies have used OECs prepared from the olfactory bulb (OB-OECs), OECs also can be prepared from the olfactory mucosa, and they are thus a candidate peripherally accessible population of glia that may be effective in promoting repair in a variety of central nervous system lesions. This protocol is designed to produce a highly enriched population of OECs from the lamina propria (LP) of the olfactory mucosa (LP-OECs), which are antigenically similar to OB-OECs and bear some phenotypic similarities to embryonic Schwann cells, but may demonstrate some distinct functional differences.