It’s routine for primary neuronal cultures to have “contamination” with naturally occurring microglia. But what happens when you don’t want these little creatures or the cytokines and cytotoxins that they release? Or you want to eliminate any effect that microglia have on neurons or astrocytes? ATS has the cheap, effective and very simple solution for this: acetylated LDL-SAP (Cat # IT-08). Just add it to the medium and microglia are eliminated. This material has been well described by Giulian and colleagues (1,2). AcLDL binds to the scavenger receptor that is well-expressed on microglia (3) and this results in internalization (4). When saporin is attached, it is carried inside, too and causes death of the microglial population. The graph below shows in vitro data from our laboratories that demonstrates the ability of acLDL- SAP to eliminate cells that express the scavenger receptor.
References
3. Christie RH, Freeman M, Hyman BT (1996) Am J Pathol 148(2):399-403.
4. Zeng Y, Tao N, Chung KN, Heuser JE, Lublin DM (2003) J Biol Chem 278(46):45931-6.