Early stages of avian development are not well-suited for in ovo studies. A critical limitation of ex ovo culture is the short period of growth that can be attained for explanted embryos. Here we report a modified and simplified version of an existing ex ovo culture method, the cornish pasty culture. We show that this modified method, referred to as MC culture, can be used to grow chick and quail embryos from Hamburger and Hamilton (HH) Stage 3 to at least HH18 with normal developmental morphology. The MC culture is also applicable to generate parabiosed twins. Combination of the MC culture with electroporation and labeling techniques will be a valuable new tool in cell lineage tracing and molecular functional analyses of early avian embryogenesis.
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