Each parabiont (young adult wild-type female mouse joined with either a young or aged wild-type female mouse) was anesthetized and an incision was made from the olecranon to the knee joint of each mouse.
The opposing muscle layers of the two mice were joined with 5-0 suturesturesutures
They created three different types of twins: young adult mice joined to each other, old mice joined to each other and young mice joined to old mice.
In initial experiments, 2-month-old female (young female, YF) mice were parabiotically joined with YF mice, 2-month-old male (young male, YM) mice or 24-month-old male (aged male, AM) mice.
To accomplish this, young adult female mice were parabiotically joined with young adult or aged female mice to examine if circulating factors from aged animals negatively affect the size of follicle reserve in ovaries of young adult females.
By using a parabiosis model, a GFP mouse was surgically joined with an APCMin/+ mouse, Powell et al. demonstrated recently that cell fusion in tumour tissue between cancer cells and macrophages and B- and T-Lymphocytes occurred in vivo [ 28].
