Isolation of Salivary Epithelial Cells from Human Salivary Glands for In Vitro Growth as Salispheres or Monolayers

Generating primary cellular models or organoid-like structures is key to answering many contemporary questions in biology. For example, we've been interested for quite some time in the mechanisms used by human viruses to facilitate replication in the salivary gland as it is an important site for horizontal transmission. The development of the salisphere-based system described in this protocol is a crucial advancement in our quest to answer these types of questions.

This technique allows us to generate primary cells from a variety of different patient samples. The cellular models are more reminiscent of the in vivo type situation as the cells are not modeled or transformed like many cell types commonly used for in vitro experiments. We've used this protocol to generate similar cells from mouse primary submandibular gland and the protocol would likely be useful for other organs with similar cellular structures.