Mouse ear notches or whole ears were collected and stored in cold Serum Free Medium (SFM), Advanced DMEM/F12 (Life Technologies) chopped with a sterile scalpel and incubated in SFM with 1mg/mL of collagenase A (Roche) for 1.5h at 37°C in 5% O2. After digestion, the tissue was passed through an 18G syringe needle and then centrifuged for 10 minutes at 1000 rpm. Next, pellets were resuspended in Advanced DMEM/F12 medium with 10% FBS (SIGMA), 2mM L-glutamine (GIBCO) and a mix of 50U/mL penicillin and 10mg/mL streptomycin (GIBCO). Isolated cells were incubated and cultivated at 37°C in 3% O2 and 5% CO2.
Cells were treated with 100 or 200nM rapamycin (SIGMA) in serum containing medium for 3 days. Controls were treated with the same amount of DMSO. Bosutinib (Santa Cruz Biotechnology) was also prepared in DMSO and controls treated with DMSO only.