May 13, 2026
Version 2
TDA-MIT: Mouse skin and lung tissue selection and collection V.2
- Ke Zhang1,2
- 1Cutaneous Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA;
- 2Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Boston, MA, USA
- Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet) Method Development Community
Protocol Citation: Ke Zhang 2026. TDA-MIT: Mouse skin and lung tissue selection and collection. protocols.io https://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.eq2ly4krelx9/v2Version created by Ke Zhang
License: This is an open access protocol distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Protocol status: Working
We use this protocol and it's working
Created: May 13, 2026
Last Modified: May 13, 2026
Protocol Integer ID: 316983
Keywords: skin tissues from p16, lung tissue selection, skin tissue, mouse skin, aged lung, tda, mice, mit
Abstract
This protocol describes the collection of young and aged lung and skin tissues from p16-3MR mice (RRID: IMSR_JAX:037045) obtained from The Jackson Laboratory.
Safety warnings
This protocol requires prior approval by the users' Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) or equivalent ethics committee.
Sample collection
Collecting the young and aged mouse lung and skin tissues from p16-3MR mice (RRID: IMSR_JAX:037045) obtained from The Jackson Laboratory. Two age groups were used to represent physiologically mature and naturally aged cohorts: young mice (2–3 months) and old mice (24–26 months). Only clinically healthy animals without visible pathological signs were selected to avoid confounding disease-related effects.
Following euthanasia in accordance with institutional animal care guidelines, tissues were dissected under sterile and controlled conditions. Full-thickness dorsal trunk skin was excised from a consistent anatomical region to minimize spatial variability across samples. For lung collection, the thoracic cavity was opened, the lungs were removed, and peripheral tissue was dissected from the lower lobes while avoiding major airways to ensure comparable sampling across animals.
Immediately after dissection, tissues were embedded in OCT compound and snap-frozen without additional treatment, then stored at –80 °C until further processing.
Sample sectioning
Frozen OCT-embedded tissue blocks were cryosectioned for downstream analyses. Tissue sections were used for spatial sequencing with Raman imaging, while adjacent sections or frozen tissue fragments were processed for nuclei isolation for snRNA-seq.