After isolating single nuclei from frozen mammalian tissues, carefully pierce the round foil on the dissociator cartridge using a pipette tip. To facilitate sucrose gradient cleanup, remove 900 microliters of the nuclei suspension from the cartridge and add it to 500 microliters of sucrose cushion solution or SCS prepared in a two milliliter tube. Mix well by pipetting until the mixture is homogenous.
Next, hold the tube at an angle, and carefully add 1, 400 microliters of nuclei suspension SCS mixture drop-wise onto a new 500 microliters of SCS, creating a clearly visible phase separation. Carefully close the tube, and place it back on the ice without disturbing the phase separation. Carefully spin the tubes at 13, 000g for 15 minutes at four degrees Celsius in a pre-cooled centrifuge.
Remove the supernatant without disturbing the palette, and carefully resuspend the palette in 50 microliters of ice-cold NSR. Pull the two palettes of the same sample in a new 1.5 milliliter tube. Add 900 microliters of ice-cold NSR to a total volume of one milliliter, and mix well by pipetting.
Centrifuge the sample at 500g for five minutes at four degrees Celsius with a swinging bucket rotor centrifuge. Remove the supernatant and resuspend the pellet in 100 microliters of PBS. For counting, dilute 10 microliters of nuclei suspension in 20 microliters of PBS.
Add 25 microliters of propidium iodide staining solution to a mixing well of the fluorescent counter counting plate. Then add 25 microliters of diluted nuclei suspension, and mix well by pipetting. Transfer 50 microliters of the stained sample from the mixing well to the loading well.
Load the counting plate on the cell counter and start the count. After counting, dilute the samples with PBS to the desired concentration for single nuclei RNA sequencing. Using the partially automated nuclei isolation protocol, good quality nuclei were obtained without signs of blabbing, debris or clumping.
Violin plots representing the distribution of gene counts, UMI counts and mitochondrial content in each sample are shown. Expected cell types from each tissue were identified, and all animals contributed to all clusters, indicating low technical variability introduced by the protocol. Furthermore, cellular proportions, UMI counts and gene counts were comparable across all three samples per tissue type.
