Sciatic nerve dissection from P1 and P7 mice - (Jun/05/2013 )

Hi everybody,
I'm statring a PhD that will be focused on peripheral nerve regeneration. First of all, anyaway, I'm going to study what happens during the developmnet of the PNS. In order to study this I will have to analyze a bunch of genes via In-situ hybridization on sciatic nerves taken at different development stages, that will be: Postnatal day 1, P7, P21, P30 and P60. I have learned to dissect adult mouse sciatic nerve, so, I guess that from P21 to P60 I won't have problems (since P21 mice look more or less similar to adults), but I'm wondering how it is possible to isolate the sciatic nerve from pups at P1 and P7.

Does anyone know how to do such thing and is willing to help me? I've been looking around in the Internet, but didn't come up with something interesting or useful, it seems that no one is interested in isolating the sciatic nerve for imaging, and I guess that's because it's difficult to take such a small nerve from a pup...

Thank you anyway for the time you'll spend on this post.


Cheers from Italy

Elisa

Hi Elisa, welcome to the forums.

I haven't done nerve dissections on pups, but I have taken muscles from early pups, and found that the secrets to it are magnification (stereo microscope if possible, or a headset with independent lenses) and practice. The morphology of an adult compared to the pups shouldn't be all that different, so you should still be able to use the "landmarks" of bone positions etc for locating the nerves.

Hi Bob, thanks for the reply. I guess the only way is to do it a million of times and practice a lot... there's no other choice