Mixed glia - Evenly spread over 24 well plate - Comments greatly appreciated! (Nov/14/2008 )

After reading several posts on this forum I discovered that most people do some method to evenly spread out the cells over the plate.
However, I have been shown (and I'm new to cell culture!) that seeding cells on a 24-well plate for mixed glia (using primary rat cortex tissue) that its most important to ensure to keep your drop of cells in the middle of the plate and allow them to adhere for several hours and then add more media - again trying not to interupt the drop of cells in the middle.
The end result is just this - the cells only grow in the centre of the plate, they do however look quite confluent, even though the edge of the well is empty. Do you think I should try to evenly coat the well by one of the methods mentioned on this forum?! Or is there something special about primary glia? I would rather not experiment with different methods since the cells are a primary culture and thus could potentially be a waste of animals.

Any comments, thoughts and observations greatly appreciated!

Primary cells usually like to have "friends" i.e. cells that are nearby so that there is a certain level of excreted proteins and signaling molecules in the surrounding medium. Having said that, many brain cultures, especially primary ones, are contact inhibited so if the processes are touching they will stop growing.

Hmmm well that is a predicament! looking at my cultures today there seems to be huge discrepancies between cell numbers in different wells - going to make my assays very tricky!