Olfactory bulb slices as a model of pre-motor Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, affecting more than 10 million people worldwide. In order to achieve a better understanding of the disease and to develop new effective therapeutics, an important step is the creation of a reliable model of the disease.

In this sense, organotypic brain slices can be a useful tool combining the main advantages of in vivo studies with the excellent experimental accessibility of in vitro models. In particular olfactory bulb slices can enable researchers to understand the early stage of the pathology, before the disease affects other regions of the brain.

The overarching goal of the project is to induce α-synuclein aggregation using DOPAL in olfactory bulb slices to mimic pre-motor PD and to study the effect of iron on the slices.

Slices have been successfully obtained and kept alive for more than 3 weeks and culture conditions have been optimised. Preliminary studies suggest that DOPAL incubation impairs viability and structural integrity of the slices in a dose dependent way and an increase in the nitrite content of the media is associated with increasing doses of DOPAL. Olfactory bulb slices show great promise as an easy, accessible and simple platform for new PD’s treatment development.