Cell culture service and in vitro assays

APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES 
 
Applications: 
- The NICO cell culture laboratory offers a wide range of possibilities to test the biological effects resulting from genetic and / or pharmacological perturbations on in vitro cell models. In particular, it is possible to use both primary cultures, deriving from rodent or human tissues, and immortalized cell lines. 
- The laboratory has particular experience in the study of neural models, such as hippocampal neurons of mice and rats in primary culture, neural stem cells, motor neuron cell lines (NSC34), tumor lines deriving from medulloblastomas and glioblastomas, in 2D and 3D cultures 
- The laboratory also has experience with non-neural models, such as mesenchymal stem cells, fibroblasts, epithelial and lymphocyte tumor lines 
- For each model, methods have been implemented for the overexpression, the 'knockdown' of specific genes and functional assays for phenotypic characterization, such as analysis of proliferative activity and survival, apoptosis of DNA damage, neural differentiation 
- The laboratory is qualified for cell transduction with BSL2 level viral vectors 
- The laboratory also includes an equipped room dedicated exclusively to the culture of human induced pluripotent cells (hiPSCs) and human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) 
 
Services 
- Consultancy in experimental design, in the definition of functional and morphometric readouts and for data processing 
- Training of new users 
- Technical assistance 
- Execution of cell survival, proliferation and differentiation assays