Explain advantages and disadvantages of organ culture.
Answers
The explants remain comparable to the in vivo organs both in structure and function, which makes them more suitable than cell cultures for physiological studies.
2. The development of foetal organs in vitro is comparable to that in vivo. Hormone dependent organs remain so, while endocrine organs secrete the specific hormones.
3. Therefore, organ cultures provide information on the patterns of growth, differentiation and development, and on the influences of various factors on these features.
4. In some cases, organ cultures may replace whole animals in experimentation as the results from them are easier to interpret.
The results obtained with organ cultures usually give an idea of the in vivo events; this often reduces considerably the number of experiments necessary with whole animals to investigate a given problem.