Microdialysis Fundamentals
What is Microdialysis?
A technique that allows for sampling from within the extracellular space of specific tissue or brain regions.
Basic Brain Microdialysis
- A microdialysis probe is inserted into a specific brain region of a freely moving animal
- A perfusion medium is slowly pumped through the probe
- Analytes cross the probe membrane from the extracellular space
- The perfusate is collected over time for analysis
What Effects Sample Recovery?
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Important points in your animal experiments...
Eicom can provide you with everything you will need to successfully setup microdialysis and efficiently analyze your samples.
What you will need
Important points to remember
- To optimize your new microdialysis system, ensure all tubing lines are the shortest length possible. This will ensure that back pressure is not an issue in your system and that your sample reaches its destination timely.
- Choose your probe wisely. Eicom will custom design a probe to fit your individual needs. The microdialysis probe should have the longest membrane possible for your specific experiment.
- Eicom’s 96-well plate fraction collector can free up hours of time. This programmable and cooling collector will do the work for you. By using the fraction collector it can alleviate the investigators' disruption to the animal during the experiment. The plate can be transferred directly from the fraction collector to the HPLC, no pipetting is necessary. Additionally, if an antioxidant is required it can be preloaded into the plate so that degradation is minimal.
- All tubing should be cleaned with a 1% bleach solution (prepared fresh daily) following every experiment. The bleach solution will destroy any bacteria that may be growing inside the lines. The bacteria can cause diminishing or interference peaks during sample analysis as well as artificially high levels of histamine.
Your first experiment
- Animals should be handled prior to experimentation.
- Be sure to slowly insert the probe during the tethering process (animals may need to be lightly anesthetized, isoflourane gas is recommended since it has a short half-life).
- Depending on the analyte of interest an equilibration period is required following probe insertion, prior to sample collection.
- To avoid fluctuations in baseline levels investigators should avoid making noise or handling the animals during experimentation.
>more details of fundamentals
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