Begin by placing the dissected mouse knee joints in a culture dish. Aspirate the culture medium and add fresh culture medium. Repeat the washing three or four times.
Then under a stereo microscope, dislocate all the joints in the culture medium by pulling them using fine point tweezers. Remove the tibia and as many vessels, tendons, and ligaments as possible, being careful not to break the bones. Prepare two 15 milliliter tubes per sample.
Using tweezers, transfer the dislocated bones with soft tissues to the first tube. For each sample obtained from both hind paws add four milliliters of digestion medium to the tube. To collect residual cells and tissue fragments transfer the culture medium from the dissection dish to the second 15 milliliter tube.
Centrifuge the medium at 500 G for 5 minutes at room temperature. After removing the supernatant, resuspend the pellet with one milliliter of digestion medium. And transfer this solution to the first 15 milliliter tube so that it contains almost all the tissue, in total five milliliters of digestion medium.
Then digest the sample for 60 to 120 minutes at 37 degrees Celsius with shaking in a hybridization oven. After incubation, mix the sample by pipetting and filter the cell solution through a 40 micron cell strainer into a 50 milliliter tube. Add 10 milliliters of culture medium to the tube through the cell strainer.
Centrifuge at 300 G for 5 minutes at room temperature. Remove the supernatant and resuspend the cell pellet with 10 milliliters of culture medium. Repeat the centrifugation, discard the supernatant, and resuspend the pellet with two milliliters of culture medium.
