Growing primary neuronal cultures on plastic? - Anyone used commercially available pre-treated plates? (May/04/2010 )

Is anyone successfully growing primary rat/mouse neurons in plastic multiwell plates? Such as using any of the various "cell cultured treated" plates offered by BD (PureCoat) and others (CellBIND, etc), or via some other method? I've attempted to simply coat the wells with poly lysine as I normally do with glass coverslips, but it didn't work particularly well. A postdoc in my lab claims that primary neurons will simply not grow well on anything but glass.

I have used CellBind from Corning to grow commercially bought rat neurons in the past and it worked.

I don't have much experience though, I got a free sample to try and it worked so I kept using them.

Hi Delta,

People in my lab routinely grow primary neuronal cultures (neonatal mixed glial cultures, embryonic VM and hippocampal cultures) on coated plastic 6/24 well plates to generate cells for PCR or WB, however for the most part we usually plate on coated glass coverslips if we are going to image the cells. We have seen no difference in cells grown on plastic or glass. We using Corning plates at the moment and have used Sarstedt plates in the past, both are fine. Which poly lysine are you using? D or L? Our cells adhere much better on poly D than poly-L treated surfaces. We coat wells with Sigma poly-D-lysine for 30min (although Sigma only advise coating for 5min) followed by 3 dH2O washes, then store the plates at -20 till needed.

Good Luck

smr86