The enteric nervous system in tissue culture. I. Cell types and their interactions in explants of the myenteric and submucous plexuses from guinea pig, rabbit and rat.

This paper describes methods for removing the ganglionated myenteric and submucous plexuses from the mammalian gut and maintaining them as explants in tissue culture. A detailed account is given of cell types, their interactions and the development of these cultures during 5 weeks in vitro. Three major cell types were identified in the cultures: neurons, glial cells and fibroblasts. The development of the plexuses in culture was studied in detail for the myenteric plexus from the guinea pig taenia coli. It followed a characteristic pattern, in which the merging of individual ganglia into a continuous monolayer of flattened neurons was accompanied and followed by the formation of an extensive outgrowth zone of flat glial cells covered by a dense mesh of outgrowing neurites. In older cultures, neuronal migration resulted in the reformation of discrete and compact aggregates, which consisted of neurons and glial cells, and were interconnected by thick neurite bundles. This arrangement resembles in many ways the original organization of enteric nervous tissue in vivo. This is the first time the enteric ganglia have been freed from the gut wall and grown in culture as explants of nervous tissue. These preparations open many new directions for investigations of the largest and most complex division of the peripheral nervous system, including studies of the molecular nature of neuronal and glial cell surfaces, analysis of cell-cell interactions, trophic factors and developmental signals.