Purification of cells from fresh human brain tissue: primary human glial cells

In order to translate the findings obtained from postmortem brain tissue samples to functional biologic mechanisms of central nervous system disease, it will be necessary to understand how these findings affect the different cell populations in the brain. The acute isolation and analysis of pure glial cell populations are common practice in animal models for neurologic diseases, but are not yet regularly applied to human postmortem brain material. The development of novel cell isolation techniques and methods for transcriptomic and proteomic analysis have made it possible to isolate and phenotype primary human cell populations from the central nervous system. The psychiatric program of the Netherlands Brain Bank has considerable experience with the purification of glial cells. This chapter will review the rapid isolation and phenotyping procedures for two major glia cell populations in the human brain, microglia and astrocytes, and will also discuss the potential for biobanking these cells, as well as the possible alternatives to cell isolations. The acute isolation of glial cells without culture-based adherence steps allows the analysis of glial alterations that underlie, or are the result of, disease neuropathology of the donor.