Harvesting Mouse Organs for Mouse Tissue Extracts - (Aug/06/2010 )

We wanted to explore harvesting mouse organs for tissue extracts. We currently purchase the organs from an outside source. But before we jumped into harvesting ourselves, wanted to find out how long it would take a trained tech to harvest mouse: Brain (unstripped), eyeball (whole), heart (Atria Removed), lung (unstripped), Lymph nodes, ovary, pancrease, placenta. Ho wdifficult is it to keep other tissues from contaminating target organ. Any help would be greatly appreciated.Thanks

when i was harvesting mouse tissue, it would take me less than 10 minutes per mouse, and that includes the time it took to knock them out with CO2. lymph nodes might take a little extra time, and ovaries were sometimes hard to find and that could take an extra minute. i don't know what you mean by other tissues contaminating the target organ...if you process them separately you shouldn't have a problem - i would snap-freeze organs on a block of dry ice so the organs didn't touch each other, and when i fixed organs each had its own tube of paraformaldehyde.

You will probably also need to consider the ethical considerations of how you are going to kill the mice and what to do with sick ones, housing loive ones, breeding etc. I advise you to talk to an animal facility (e.g Jackson Laboratories in the US) about what sort of facilities you may need.