Thinned-skulled Cranial Window Preparation (Mice)

Lifeng Zhang; Bo Liang; Yun Li; Da-Ting Lin

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.2158

Thinned-skulled Cranial Window Preparation (Mice)

Bio Protoc. 2017 Mar 5;7(5):e2158. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2158.

Authors

Lifeng Zhang¹, Bo Liang¹, Yun Li¹, Da-Ting Lin^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, USA.
² The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, USA.
³ The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA.

Abstract

Imaging structural plasticity or activity of neurons in the brain circuit will facilitate understanding the neural mechanisms underlying animal behavior. Here we describe a modified procedure, the polished and reinforced thinned-skull cranial window preparation, by which we can image dendrites and spines in mouse layer I cortex for weeks ( Zhang et al., 2016 ). By this method, we also imaged the glioma initiation in the mouse cortex for two weeks in previous work ( Zhang et al., 2012 ), which included the photographs and video for reference.

Keywords: Cranial window; Mouse brain; Neuroscience; Structural plasticity; in vivo imaging.