Co-culture Systmes. Biological & Biomedical Sciences Article (Article Sample)

Co-culture Systems
A co-culture is the culture of multiple, distinct cell types, directly or indirectly, within the same culture environment, where the populations of cultivated cells grow with a certain degree of contact between them (Paschos et al., 2014).
The premise of the co-culture system in tissue engineering is the presence of two types of cells, target cells and assisting cells. Target cells are the cells to be influenced to differentiate eventually composing the engineered tissue. Assisting cells are those that guide or influence the target cells to proliferate and differentiate (Paschos et al., 2014).
Co-culture systems have long been used to study the interactions between cell populations and are fundamental to cell–cell interaction studies of any kind (Goers et al., 2014). Among the studies where co-culturing methods are of great importance are infection studies (Cottet et al., 2002), biomimicry of natural systems (Kim, 2005), and drug research as co-cultures provide a more representative, human in vivo-like tissue model than animal models, allowing for a clearer perspective and monitoring of a drug effect on cellular interactions (Wu et al., 2010).