Medial fetal ventral mesencephalon

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Abstract
CURRENTLY, fetal tissue transplantation into patients with Parkinson's disease utilizes the entire ventral mesencephalon (VM) as donor tissue. However, the resulting mixture of cell types contains a relatively low proportion of therapeutically relevant dopamine (DA) neurons. We show that differential dissection of a medial region of embryonic day 14 rat VM yields a significantly higher proportion of DA neurons (8–10%) than is found in lateral VM (2%) or whole VM (4–5%). Medial VM also contained a larger number of the specific subpopulation of DA neurons (aldehyde dehydrogenase-positive; AHD) that project to dorsolateral motor region of the striatum. Selective dissection of fetal medial VM selectively enriches DA neurons in cell preparations useful for transplantation in Parkinson's disease.