Allograft Model of Aortic Arch Segment Grafting to Abdominal Aorta Through End-to-Side Anastomosis in Mice

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified surgical protocol for creating a mouse aortic graft model, enabling high success rates and effective study of atherosclerosis regression.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a modified protocol that improves surgical techniques for aortic grafting in mice, enhancing graft potency and success rates.

Findings

The modified protocol achieved over 90% operation success rate with aortic clamping time under 60 minutes.

Graft potency was confirmed through micro-CT, ultrasound, and blood flow measurements.

Significant atherosclerosis regression was observed in the grafts one week post-transplantation.

Abstract

The mouse aortic transplantation model is a valuable tool for investigating the mechanisms of atherosclerosis regression, but few laboratories can generate it due to the operation difficulty, especially for the style of end-to-side anastomosis, which facilitates syngeneic heterotopic transplanting a plaque-rich aortic arch into the abdominal aorta. Here we provide a modified protocol for generating this allograft model, which is capable of overcoming several critical surgical challenges such as separating a longer abdominal aorta segment, reducing bleeding and thrombosis, optimizing aortotomy, and improving end-to-side anastomosis to guarantee a potent graft. By transplanting plaque-rich aortic arches into the abdominal aorta of wildtype mice, a high operation success rate (over 90%) was noted with aortic clamping time under 60 min, the graft potency was satisfactory evidenced by examinations of micro-CT, ultrasound, and lower limb blood flow measurement, while a significant atherosclerosis regression was observed in the grafts at 1 week after transplantation.

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