Culture and transfection of axolotl cells

The use of cells grown in vitro has been instrumental for multiple aspects of biomedical research and especially molecular and cellular biology. The ability to grow cells from multicellular organisms like humans, squids, or salamanders is important to simplify the analyses and experimental designs to help understand the biology of these organisms. The advent of the first cell culture has allowed scientists to tease apart the cellular functions, and in many situations these experiments help understand what is happening in the whole organism. In this chapter, we describe techniques for the culture and genetic manipulation of an established cell line from axolotl, a species widely used for studying epimorphic regeneration.