The cellular model for Alzheimer's disease research: PC12 cells

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common age-related neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive cognitive decline and irreversible memory impairment. Currently, several studies have failed to fully elucidate AD's cellular and molecular mechanisms. For this purpose, research on related cellular models may propose potential predictive models for the drug development of AD. Therefore, many cells characterized by neuronal properties are widely used to mimic the pathological process of AD, such as PC12, SH-SY5Y, and N2a, especially the PC12 pheochromocytoma cell line. Thus, this review covers the most systematic essay that used PC12 cells to study AD. We depict the cellular source, culture condition, differentiation methods, transfection methods, drugs inducing AD, general approaches (evaluation methods and metrics), and in vitro cellular models used in parallel with PC12 cells.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; PC12 cells; culture condition; differentiation methods; drugs inducing AD; in vitro cellular models used in parallel with PC12 cells; transfection methods.

Figure 1

The characteristics of common hypothesis in AD study. Colored text on left side of figure represents cholinergic hypothesis, Aβ hypothesis, Tau protein phosphorylation hypothesis, oxidative stress hypothesis, neuroinflammatory hypothesis, respectively; black text on right side of figure represents relevant pathologic characteristics.

Figure 2

The methods to construct cell models on pathophysiologic processes of AD studies. The figure shows how to cause differentiation, the characteristics of PC12 cells after differentiation, the expression of receptors on PC12 cells, and common damaging agents to mimic AD cell models in AD research.