Peripheral nerve contains heterogeneous growth factors that support sensory neurons in vitro.

The availability of dissociated cultures of embryonic neurons has given impetus to a number of studies which have detected trophic factors in many mammalian and avian tissues maintained in vivo and in vitro [1, 2, 4-8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18-21]. Using a single sensory neuron biological assay for mouse nerve growth factor (NGF) [17] as a reference standard, we report here that neurite promoting activity is highly enriched in segments of adult mouse peripheral nerve. Neurite outgrowth at 30 h, kinetics of neurite appearance and inhibition with rabbit antiserum to mouse NGF indicate that the trophic activities are heterogeneous and support both NGF-dependent and NGF-independent neuron populations of chick embryo sensory ganglia.