Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 26, 2026
Collection of Frozen Rodent Brain Regions for Downstream Analyses
Published on: April 23, 2020
A comparison of human brain dissection by drill versus saw on nucleic acid quality
Ross C Buerlein1, Thomas M Hyde, Barbara K Lipska
1National Institutes of Mental Health, Clinical Brain Disorders Branch, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. buerleinr@mail.nih.gov
Abstract:
This study examined the effect of two dissection techniques on the quality of human brain specimens. Frozen cerebellar samples were obtained from postmortem brains of 10 subjects free from neurological and psychiatric disease. These tissues were tested for RNA and DNA concentration and quality after being dissected with either an electric dental drill or a small handsaw. RNA and DNA were extracted separately from each sample, and the concentrations and quality of each were measured. We found that dissection technique does not significantly affect RNA or DNA quality/yield. RNA and DNA yields, as well as RNA integrity showed no significant differences between the two dissection techniques. Therefore, these results support the use of a high-speed hand-held electric dental drill as an efficient and anatomically precise means of human brain dissection without compromising tissue quality.
