Supreya Wanichpakorn and Ureporn Kedjarune-Laggat

pp. 327 - 331

Abstract

Primary cell culture of human oral tissue has many applications for oral biology research. There are two techniques in
primary culture, which includes the enzymatic and direct explant technique. The objectives of this study were (1) to isolate and
investigate the difference in percentage the success in culturing three cell types from human oral tissue: gingival keratinocytes,
gingival fibroblasts and periodontal ligament fibroblasts by using the direct explant technique; (2) to compare the effect of
sex and age on the success of tissue culturing. Twenty seven tissue samples were obtained from healthy human gingival
tissue, 19 female and 8 male patients aged 14-67 years (37.7±17.5). The tissue was cut into 1x1 mm pieces and placed on
plastic culture plates containing Dulbecco,
s Modified Eagle,
s Medium supplemented with 10% fetal calf serum, 100 U/ml
penicillin, 100 µg/ml streptomycin and 1% amphotericin B. For the keratinocytes culture, after the epithelial cells started to
multiply around the gingival origin and the diameter was 2-5 mm., the fibroblasts were liminated by mechanical removal under
inverted microscope to prevent fibroblast overgrowth and the medium was changed to keratinocyte-SFM (Gibco, BRL)
supplemented with 5 µg/ml gentamycin. The results revealed that gingival fibroblast gave the highest success rate in culture
(96.3%), followed by gingival keratinocytes (88.9%) and periodontal ligament fibroblasts (81.5%). There was no significant
difference in the success rate of cultivation between younger and older individuals, as between sex of the subjects (p>0.05).
The risk of failure in culture techniques is mainly caused by microbiological contamination from the tissue samples. 

Keywords

• primary cell culture
• direct explant technique
• gingival keratinocytes
• gingival fibroblasts
• periodontal ligament fibroblasts