Table 1.

A summary of the strengths and weaknesses of rodent primary culture models compared to human embryonic cell line-based systems

Cell culture based in vitro system	Strengths	Weaknesses
Rodent culture	Comparative ease of derivation of mature cell types	Differences in biology may limit translation for human disease modelling
	Genetic manipulation
	Animal models allow transplantation studies
Human embryonic stem cell (HESC)	Human genome adds relevance	Technically difficult
	Expandable in culture	Currently enriched derivation of all mature neural cell types is limited
	Can potentially derive many/all neural cell types in a single line	Heterogeneity between different HESC cell lines
		Functional validation necessary