In Vitro Study of the Developing Inner Ear

Abstract

Introduction The purpose of this presentation is to describe a tissue culture technique which makes possible the microscopic study and photography of the differentiating cells of the inner ear in the living state. The first successful attempt at cultivating the chick embryo otocyst in vitro was by Fell¹ in 1928. A plasma clot formed in a watch glass was used as the culture medium. Lawrence and Merchant² in 1953 and Friedmann³ in 1956 reported their studies using similar methods. In all 3 cases, cultures were fixed, sectioned, and stained in order to study the microscopic cellular structure in later stages of differentiation. This was made necessary by the thickness of the preparation due to the rapid outgrowth of opaque tissues, which obscured the ectodermal structures. The morphology of tissues is inevitably changed by the conventional methods of preparing tissues by histologic technique; the cells often shrink to