Sensory neurons in culture: changing requirements for survival factors during embryonic development.

The effect of nerve growth factor (NGF) and medium conditioned by glioma cells (GCM) on the survival of chicken sensory neurons in culture was investigated. Neurons were isolated from embryos 8 days (E8) to 16 days (E16) old and the proportion of surviving neurons was determined after 2 days in culture. In the absence of NGF or GCM, essentially no neurons survived at any age. In the presence of NGF, survival increased from 25% of the neurons at E8 to 40% between E10 and E12 and then decreased to background level (5%) at E16. In contrast, in the presence of GCM, survival increased continuously from 10% of the neurons at E8 to 75% at E16. At early developmental stages, the effect of NGF and GCM together was greater than the sum of their individual effects: at E8, about 80% of the neurons survived, double the number expected for a simple additive effect. Thus, a significant proportion of chicken neurons from dorsal root ganglia require both NGF and GCM for survival, and this may well include neurons from the ventro-lateral population, which do not respond to NGF alone. As neurons matured, the double requirement progressively decreased and, by E16, NGF no longer increased the number of neurons over that surviving in response to GCM alone. The facts that rat brain extracts mimicked the effect of GCM and that the potency of the brain extracts of rat in the postnatal period increased in parallel with the development of the glial cells suggest that glial cells produce a factor(s) both immunologically and functionally different from NGF which supports the survival of sensory neurons.