Agar coating in multicellular spheroids culture of rat hepatocytes

Aggregation of freshly isolated adult rat hepatocytesin vitro is important for the construction of artificial liver support system. In the experiment, agar has been used as an extracellular matrix substrate and results demonstrate that hepatocytes in serum-free culture medium can effectively form floating spheroids in tissue culture dishes coated with agar, which maintain higher ability to produce urea and albumin than monolayer cultured cells.