Liver slice culture allows many “feeding trials” on the same individual, providing much better control over biological variation than live feeding trials. Here’s how: Cut out a small block of liver and superglue it to a plastic cylinder. Encase it in agar and mount it in a vibratome, a slicing machine. Each slice goes into its own lab dish, to be fed for example vegetable oil or marine oils.
Jacob Torgersen and his PhD student Tom Harvey use liver slices as a wet-lab model system. Here’s a slow-motion video of the vibratome in action:
Video credit: Tom Harvey
And here’s what you can see in the microscope after five days on different “diets”:
Image credt: Jacob Torgersen
The images show stained neutral lipids in three slices from the same fish, cultured on substrate containing no oil (some lipids from day 0 remain), vegetable oil (characteristically large drops of fat), and marine oil (characteristic small droplets of fat). Slices were stained for nonpolar fatty acids; images are 50 μm across. Omics analyses of gene expression and meta¬bolic activity are currently being investigated. Omics data from multiple in vitro diets will be extremely helpful for example in building mathematical models of salmon fatty acid metabolism.
References: doi:10.1096/fj.10-173716, doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.jbchem.a022240