Begin by culturing the eyelet samples isolated from regular fat diet or high fat diet mice overnight at 37 degrees Celsius. Design the desired experimental conditions for the study. For each experimental condition, using a pipette, pick 100 eyelets into a six centimeter Petri dish containing two milliliters of eyelet medium.
To induce Mitophagy, treat the eyelets in the appropriate Petri dishes with two microliters of 250 nano molar Valinomycin stock for three hours. Isolate the eyelets and using a pipette, transfer the eyelets from each Petri dish to a separate micro centrifuge tube. Then, spin the eyelets at 350 G for one minute at 10 degrees Celsius and using a pipette, discard the supernatant.
Wash the obtained sample twice with one milliliter of PBS. Between the washes, spin the sample and discard the supernatant as demonstrated previously. To dissociate eyelets into single cells, add 500 microliters of 0.05%Trypsin prewarmed to 37 degrees celsius, to one sample tube.
Pipette the contents of the tube up and down repeatedly until the eyelets are visibly dispersed. Immediately add one milliliter of prewarmed eyelet medium to neutralize trypsin. Spin the samples at 500 G for five minutes at 10 degrees Celsius.
Remove the supernatant carefully without disturbing the pellet. Then, wash the samples two times with eyelet flow medium. The cell samples are now ready to be stained for flow cytometric analysis of beta cell mitophagy.
