Use of a hanging-weight system for liver ischemia in mice

Acute liver injury due to ischemia can occur during several clinical procedures e.g. liver transplantation, hepatic tumor resection or trauma repair and can result in liver failure which has a high mortality rate. Therefore murine studies of hepatic ischemia have become an important field of research by providing the opportunity to utilize pharmacological and genetic studies. Specifically, conditional mice with tissue specific deletion of a gene (cre, flox system) provide insights into the role of proteins in particular tissues. Because of the technical difficulty associated with manually clamping the portal triad in mice, we performed a systematic evaluation using a hanging-weight system for portal triad occlusion which has been previously described. By using a hanging-weight system we place a suture around the left branch of the portal triad without causing any damage to the hepatic lobes, since also the finest clamps available can cause hepatic tissue damage because of the close location of liver tissue to the vessels. Furthermore, the right branch of the hepatic triad is still perfused thus no intestinal congestion occurs with this technique as blood flow to the right hepatic lobes is preserved. Furthermore, the portal triad is only manipulated once throughout the entire surgical procedure. As a result, procedures like pre-conditioning, with short times of ischemia and reperfusion, can be easily performed. Systematic evaluation of this model by performing different ischemia and reperfusion times revealed a close correlation of hepatic ischemia time with liver damage as measured by alanine (ALT) and aspartate (AST) aminotransferase serum levels. Taken together, these studies confirm highly reproducible liver injury when using the hanging-weight system for hepatic ischemia and intermittent reperfusion. Thus, this technique might be useful for other investigators interested in liver ischemia studies in mice. Therefore the video clip provides a detailed step-by-step description of this technique.