Cell culture and cochlear dissections

While I wait for my boss to get done seeing a couple of patients so that we can have lab meeting this morning, I thought I would write a couple lines (more likely a couple of paragraphs).

With Ningyong gone, I have been doing a lot of dissections. Last week, I dissected the spiral ganglion out of the cochlea of about 9 rat pups. After dissociating the ganglion into its individual neurons (there are about 30,000 neurons per spiral ganglion), I cultured them on some specialized substrates. We are doing a study with a researcher in Chemical Engineering who uses different polymethacrylates (contact lens are a type of methacrylate) to create patterns. We are having him create some slides for us with what are essentially furrows of differing widths. We are trying to see if we can direct the axons to grow along the furrows. We had some intial success but the last batch of slides I got were in pretty rough condition. I don't know if I will get any useful information from these polymers. When I get things worked out, I will post some pictures. The first round of images were pretty impressive. Eventually, this study could lead to a method of improving the interaction of neurons to cochlear implant electrodes thereby improving the level of hearing in cochlear implant patients.