Does anyone have recommendations for a small mortar pestle that is sufficient for liquid nitrogen grinding of mouse DRG? There are plenty of mortar and pestles but they’re large, probably too large for a few DRG. Anyone do this?
We use a homogenizer with plastic pestles–it works great for small tissue stored in eppendorf tubes.
Do you use with liquid nitrogen? We have this. I didn’t think it’d work for my purpose.
Not sure what exactly you mean. We don’t have liquid nitrogen in the tubes, but we flash freeze in liquid nitrogen, store at -80, and then use the homogenizer with the Qiagen RNAeasy kit for RNA isolation. I think it should be fine for standard trizol protocols as well
Hey. OK. Yeah, no I’m not trying to extract RNA. For certain applications, people will flash freeze tissue and then grind the tissue while it’s still frozen solid (in liquid nitrogen) to get a fine powder.
Like this:
DRGs are so tiny, I’m worried if i used a standard sized mortar pestle, it’s spread all over and I’d recover very little.
@tberta - have you done this?
Ah, okay. I don’t have experience with that, but you may be able to use a glass tube mortar and pestle, like this one: https://www.supplymylab.com/Supplies/Mortar-and-Pestles/_/64AD585F-1B65-4162-9023-BBA71281498E?q=099C%20S65&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9Yz8zdSP2gIVVsDICh3vzgYiEAQYBSABEgLiEvD_BwE
We use this technique for skin samples, but a simple Trizol and pestle approach works fine for DRG and spinal cord.
Thanks Temo. Yes, for just getting RNA out, mortar and pestle (glass), as you showed me, works well. But I want to do frozen with liquid nitrogen to do other things (nuclei extraction). We’ll see.