Abstract
Mammary gland development starts during embryogenesis, and the process continues after birth. During development, the mammary gland undergoes massive morphological and physiological alterations including growth, invasion, and branching morphogenesis providing an ideal model for stem cell and cancer biology studies. Great efforts have been made in understanding mammary gland development during puberty and adulthood; however, the process during embryogenesis is still elusive. One reason is that the tools to study tissue dynamics during development are limited, which is partially due to the lack of an ex vivo culture method. Here we describe an updated organ culture protocol of the murine embryonic mammary gland. This powerful tool allows monitoring of growth and branching morphogenesis of mammary gland ex vivo by live imaging. In addition, we introduce a novel method for culturing intact, stroma-free mammary rudiments from late gestation mouse embryos in 3D in Matrigel. This approach can be used to identify the direct stromal cues for branching morphogenesis.
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Acknowledgment
We thank Raija Savolainen and Maria Voutilainen for technical assistance and helpful discussions, and all the Mikkola lab members for the great support.
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland, the Cancer Society of Finland, the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, and the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation.
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Lan, Q. et al. (2022). Protocol for Studying Embryonic Mammary Gland Branching Morphogenesis Ex Vivo. In: Vivanco, M.d. (eds) Mammary Stem Cells. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2471. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2193-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2193-6_1
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