Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center

This article describes in detail a method based on silver nanoparticles for ameliorating biliary atresia syndrome in an experimental biliary atresia mouse model. A solid understanding of the reagent preparation process and the neonatal mouse injection technique will help familiarize researchers with the method used in neonatal mouse model studies.

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most severe gastrointestinal (GI) disease that often occurs in premature infants, especially very low birth weight infants, with high mortality and unclear pathogenesis. The cause of NEC may be related to inflammatory immune regulatory system abnormalities. An NEC animal model is an indispensable tool for NEC disease immune research. NEC animal models usually use C57BL/6J neonatal mice; BALB/c neonatal mice are rarely used. Related studies have shown that when mice are infected, Th2 cell differentiation is predominant in BALB/c mice compared to C57BL/6J mice. Studies have suggested that the occurrence and development of NEC are associated with an increase in T helper type 2 (Th2) cells and are generally accompanied by infection. Therefore, this study used neonatal BALB/c mice to induce an NEC model with similar clinical characteristics and intestinal pathological changes as those observed in children with NEC. Further study is warranted to determine whether this animal model could be used to study Th2 cell responses in NEC.

We established a mouse model of chronic liver fibrosis, which provides a suitable animal model for the virus-induced liver fibrosis mechanistic study of biliary atresia (BA) and a platform for future BA treatments.