A practical guide to insect cell cultures: establishment and maintenance of primary cell cultures

In the last three decades several insect species have been studied in vitro using cell culture revealing fundamental information about their biology. However, numerous important species have never been investigated at a cellular level so that insect cell culture is still in an early stage of its potential development. In the present review, we summarized the main steps involved in the establishment of primary cell cultures to serve as a practical guide for current and future entomologists to leverage the power of cell cultures. This approach has the potential to generate valuable results and suggestions about insect metabolism, vectorial capacity and adaptation to different stresses and challenges. Although most published papers discussed immortalized cell lines, we focussed our review on primary cell culture since they can give precise data in different research fields.