The abilities of the rat brain to sustain the survival of implanted or cultured embryonic dorsal root ganglion neurons depend on the selected region.
The purpose of the present study was to examine the regional distribution of trophic activity in the lesioned adult rat brain on implanted peripheral neurons as target cells. Embryonic dorsal root ganglia (DRG) were implanted into selected regions of previously lesioned adult rat brains. The survival of these neurons was quantified after thirty days. In another experiment embryonic DRG neurons were cultured for 24 h together with tissue extracts of the same lesioned brain regions and the neuronal survival was estimated. We report here that all the tested regions, i.e. the occipital, parietal and frontal cortex, the hippocampus and the striatum, exert a trophic effect on embryonic DRG neurons both 'in vivo' and 'in vitro'. This effect is twice as high in the hippocampus as in the striatum, the other cortical regions showing intermediate values. The in vitro results are qualitatively the same as the in vivo results.
D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002470:Cell Survival; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000502:physiology; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D005727:Ganglia, Spinal / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology* / Q000637:transplantation; D006085:Graft Survival; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D009414:Nerve Growth Factors / Q000502:physiology*; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D051381:Rats; D011919:Rats, Inbred Strains
D009414:Nerve Growth Factors