Ovine fetuses from slaughterhouses: A useful source for neural cell primary cultures

A lot of evidence demonstrates that sheep could represent an experimental model to set
up medical procedures in view of their application on humans. Sheep are chosen as
models for human biomechanical studies because their skeleton has some similarities to
humans. The aim of this work was to set up sheep primary cultures from ovine fetuses
at different ages, from pregnant uteri retrieved at local abattoirs. Cell characterization
showed that one cell population was immunopositive to GFAP and identifiable as
astrocytes, whereas a second cell type was III β-tubulin-positive, and hence classified as
neurons. At 60-day old fetus is suitable to obtain neurons, whereas in a 90-day old fetus
the cell culture is predominantly characterized by glial cells. The procedure here
proposed is inexpensive, in fact, collecting fetuses during sheep slaughtering is a costsaving option,
unlike common experimental animals such as mice, rats, rabbits, that
require very high economical efforts. Finally, our protocol fully eliminates the need of
animal killing, being living animals replaced by a validated in vitro model in agreement
with the 3Rs statement.