Freezing Injury in Mouse Masseter Muscle to Establish an Orofacial Muscle Fibrosis Model

Current skeletal muscle regeneration studies merely focus on the limb and the trunk muscle, leaving the characteristics and mechanism of orofacial muscle regeneration largely unexplored. The scope of this research is to create and easier and reliable mouse model to facilitate further investigation into muscle regeneration in the orofacial area. Recent developments review that orofacial muscles constitute a unique subset of skeletal muscle with a distinct evolutionary trajectory and developmental origin.

They also exhibit different regeneration performances compared with their limb counterparts. A deeper investigation into the orofacial muscle regeneration is warranted to figure out the mechanism underlying these marked differences. The study present a rapid and reproducible method to study orofacial muscle regeneration.

The half-freezing injury process took 20 minutes, and the harvest process took only 10 minutes for each mouse, and the mice can tolerate the injury well without any impairment of locomotion. Since our model allows for subsequent comparison between the fibrotic masseter muscle and the fully regenerated tibialis anterior muscle from the aspects of morphology, histology, and molecular regulation, it serves us a power for two for us to delve deeper into the underlying mechanism. Our future research will focus on the causal effects among the alterations of the resident muscle stem cells and multiple niche cells, and correspondingly developed interventions to the process of orofacial muscle fibrosis.