Abstract:

The therapeutic potential for OECs to repair the injured spinal cord is encouraging, however to clarify the efficacy of the therapy it is important that uniform and consistent purity of OECs are obtained. Considering that OECs from the peripheral nerve and from the olfactory bulb have distinctly different behavioural characteristics (Windus et al., 2010) it is clear that the different subpopulations can exert varying effects. When the potential inclusion of accessory OECs is also considered in animal models of spinal cord repair, their differing capacity for phagocytosis of axon debris will introduce another variable that will likely produce variable outcomes and confound the analysis of the therapeutic effect of OECs. Therefore, in order to achieve a more thorough understanding of the therapeutic potential of OECs and to achieve consistent outcomes in spinal injury models, it is crucial that strategies are developed to optimise the purification of the different subpopulations of OECs. As the accessory olfactory nerve bundles project along the septum and medial surfaces of the olfactory bulb, one simple strategy to minimise the potential contamination by the accessory OECs is to avoid harvesting cells from the septum/medial nerve fibre layer and instead harvest cells from the turbinates and lateral margins of the olfactory bulb. By improving the purity of the OEC preparations, we are likely to achieve more consistent outcomes in animal spinal injury models.