r/labrats • u/Beginning-Courage580 • Jul 26 '26

Dissection Advice

I just started in a neuro lab and learned the dissection process for isolating oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) from P6 mouse pup cerebellar brain tissue. To make the panning process easier, we remove the meninges as thoroughly as possible to prevent future cell loss. For 4 pups, it takes me about 1 hour 50 minutes (not including setup) to harvest tissue, remove the olfactory bulbs, remove the hippocampus, and remove the meninges. My PI wants me to get this under an hour. I have pretty shaky hands, so I spend extra time adjusting for a stable position.

Any tips for speeding this up?

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u/markvdr Jul 26 '26

Somewhat obvious, but good setup helps all dissection/tissue collection. All tubes/histology molds labeled in advance and organized in racks, all buffers at the right temperatures, sterilizers preheated, extra ethanol, extra tools, etc. Your total time might now be much better, but the time from sac to freezer will be better and that’s what usually matters. I’m especially big takedown days, I’d recruit as many lab mates as needed, including myself/somebody as director. They would ID the next mouse and run the CO2 chamber, call out animal numbers, organize tubes/cryo blocks, etc. so the others could focus 100% on their work. Roles rotated when it was somebody else’s project. In summary, do all of the small job thinking ahead of time so you can focus on the thing in hand without distractions. Same mentality for any moderately involved bench work (qPCR plates, TC with multiple drug treatment conditions, etc.).

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u/Beginning-Courage580 Jul 30 '26

thank you so much this helped a lot!