Harvesting tumours for re-transplant - (Apr/22/2014 )

Hi

I've grown tumours subcutaneously (in flanks of nude mice). Does anyone have a protocol or can point me to a paper with an outlined protocol of how to do this? 

I'm planning to cull the mice, cut the tumours out and then chop them into smaller pieces, say 10 pieces per 1 mL freezing medium in a cryovial, into Mr Frosty and then into -80C 2 days later. Does this sound right?

Cheers!

I've no experience with freezing tumours, but for cells you would put the Mr Frosty straight into the -80, it is the cooling rate that is essential.  In addition, the freezing medium can be quite toxic, so 2 days is a rather long time for this sort of thing.

Your best bet would be to have a trial run on a couple of different tumours and see how they go in terms of cell survival - just plate them out rather than trying to re-implant.