Isolating Immune Cells from Mouse Brain and Skull

Our research focuses on the complex immune response following brain ischemia caused by ischemic stroke and cardiac arrest. Brain ischemia triggers the activation resident immune cells in the brain and the infiltration of immune cells. However, our understanding of this immune cells remains limited.

We aim to dissect the immune state, origin, and functional roles of this brain cells after ischemia. Recent research highlights the surprising role of the skull in the brain's immune response following injury. Therefore, it is important to analyze changes in immune cells in both the brain tissue and the skull bone marrow after brain ischemia.

To this end, a critical step is to obtain a sufficient number of high-quality immune cells for further analysis. Our protocols enable researchers to rapidly obtain large quantities of available immune cells from the brain and the skull bone marrow. The brain immune cell protocol uses a mechanical dissociation approach at low temperature throughout, ensuring better preservation of the transcriptional and the proteomic profiles.

The skull bone marrow protocol is simple, yet effective for extracting bone marrow cells from the skull. We'll continue our comprehensive research on the impact of brain ischemia on immune cells in brain tissue and the skull. Given that neuroinflammation plays a key role in the pathophysiology of brain injury after ischemia, our research is expected to discover novel therapeutic targets for brain protection after ischemic stroke or cardiac arrest.