Mouse Kidney Transplantation

Abstract

Experimental organ transplantation in rodents drives the development of novel insights into underlying mechanisms of ischemia/reperfusion injury and chronic/acute rejection. Mouse kidney transplantation plays an important role in both scientific research and translational medicine. Since Skoskiewicz M et al. firstly established the model of mouse kidney transplantation in 1973 (Skoskiewicz et al. 1973), many attempts have been made to modify the techniques (Ge and Gong 2011). However, the intractable manipulation on the urinary continuity has frustrated microsurgeon to establish this model and de facto hampered its wide use. Based on past experience on rat kidney transplant model, many researchers adopted bladder-to-bladder anastomosis as a direct end-to-end anastomosis is infeasible to achieve owing to the extremely tiny diameter of mouse ureter. On the other hand, blood is difficult to supply the lower segment of donor ureter and the bladder patch, leading to tissue necrosis. Herein, we describe the ureteral implantation technique for urethral reconstruction, which was initially developed by Han WR et al. in 1999 (Han et al. 1999).