No guts no glory: how to best prepare whole mounts of mouse intestines

摘要

The study of mouse cancer and/or inflammation often requires the preparation of whole mounts of the colon or of the small intestine and colon.I first saw this done by a very skilful young lady using a precision pair of offset scissors and it took about 20 minutes per mouse. This was obviously not very practical for comparative studies, which require a reasonable amount of mice [say 10 per group [subject to statistical concerns and the 3Rsj. Furthermore the long time taken means that the risk of tissue degradation is high and it is far more difficult to score the tissue if the preparation is less than optimal. We therefore tried out various cutting guides. The first was based on a series of metal plates, but which had various cutting groves, but the plates obscured the tissue behind rendering the cutting difficult to control. Looking at a conventional six-sided pencil finally provided inspiration, as we could then see how it, or ideally a half such pencil, could make a good guide for a blade [Figure 1]. It was then relatively straightforward to /design a lid with four cutting guides but it nevertheless needed a bit of trial and error to getthe dimensions right. The difference between preparations can be dramatic as the 'before' and 'after' preparations in Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate The top of the original devices were constructed from several pieces of metal, but later ones, and the current model were machinedout of a solid piece of Duralumin. The base has always been machined out of highest quality high-density resin.