Jennifer Willoughby, a doctoral student in bioarchaeology at Western University in London, Canada, convinced a cancer lab to send her a handful of recently deceased mice, most with tumors and a few without.
The team measured which of these genes were functioning in tissues from recently deceased mice and zebrafish, tracking changes for 4 days in the fish and 2 days in the rodents.
They analyzed over 1,000 genes from deceased mice and zebrafish tissue, working under the hypothesis that there would be no activity.
Tumors from non-autolysed tissues were recovered from moribund or recently deceased mice.
All deceased mice had only P. aeruginosa recovered from the spleens, ranging in levels from 106 to 109 CFU/g spleen (Figure 5).
Visual inspection of live and deceased mice revealed pronounced kyphosis and scoliosis (Fig. 4A).
As much soft tissue as possible was removed from skeletons of deceased mice before fixation overnight in 95% ethanol.
The fixed hearts were removed from the deceased mice, cut into small pieces, and immersed for 90 min at 4°C in the same fixative for post-fixation.
Compared with the routine histology of specific organs and macroscopically affected tissues in deceased mice, sequential whole-body imaging allows more comprehensive detection of various tumour manifestations.
Limbs and sternae from deceased mice were fixed overnight in formalin and were then decalcified by immersion in 10% EDTA-ammonium hydroxide, pH 7.2, for 2 weeks prior to paraffin embedding.
