To begin, fill a glass Dounce with two milliliters of ice-cold nuclei lysis buffer containing 0.01%digitonin, and add the dissected mouse brain tissue pieces into it. Using a glass Dounce tissue homogenizer, homogenize the tissue 25 times each with pestles A and B, and transfer the resulting homogenate into a 15-milliliter tube. Add two milliliters of ice-cold nuclei lysis buffer containing 0.01%digitonin to the homogenate and incubate on ice for five minutes.
Then, centrifuge the nuclei at 500 G for five minutes at four degrees Celsius. Using a micropipette, remove the supernatant and add four milliliters of ice-cold nuclei lysis buffer containing 0.01%digitonin. Filter the nuclei suspension through a 40-micrometer cell strainer.
Centrifuge the nuclei again, remove the supernatant and add four milliliters of staining buffer to wash the nuclei. After filtering the suspension through a 40-micrometer cell strainer, pellet the nuclei by centrifugation and resuspend the nuclei in one milliliter of PBS containing 0.04%BSA and RNase inhibitors. To count the cells, mix 10 microliters of 0.4%trypan blue with 10 microliters of the nuclei in a 0.5-milliliter tube.
Count the nuclei using an automated cell counter. Transfer 100 microliters of the nuclei to a FACS tube for the unstained control. Add 10 microliters of 7-AAD to the remaining nuclei and incubate for five minutes at four degrees Celsius, and proceed with nuclei sorting using FACS.
Then, transfer 10 microliters of the sorted nuclei into a new FACS tube containing 90 microliters of DPBS with 2%heat-inactivated FBS. After centrifuging the sorted nuclei, remove the supernatant using a micropipette and resuspend the nuclei in 100 microliters of diluted nuclei buffer. Before sorting, the sample contains substantial debris with over 99%of singlets positive for nuclear stain, indicating effective cell lysis.
Brain nuclei after sorting demonstrated an increase in purity from the initial 36%to nearly 100%
