Transplantation of Embryonic Cortical Tissue into Lesioned Adult Brain in Mice

Transplantation of embryonic cortical tissue for repairing the damaged brain has provided a potential therapy for brain injury and diseases. The grafted tissue can successfully survive and participate in reestablishing the functional neural circuit of the host brain. Transplantation surgery can be combined with fluorescently labeled transgenic mice to evaluate the reconstruction of neuronal network ( Falkner et al., 2016 ) and the repopulation of a subset of cortical cells. By using this approach, we have shown that infiltrating cells from host brain can restore the microglial population in the graft tissue ( Wang et al., 2016 ). This protocol describes the detailed procedure of the transplantation surgery in mice, including establishing a lesion model in the host brain, preparing the embryonic cortical graft, and transplanting the embryonic cortical graft to adult brain.