Magalhaes Joana, Lamas Sofia, Portinha Carlos, Logarinho Elsa
Insparya Science and Clinical Institute, 4150-516 Porto, Portugal.
Aging and Aneuploidy Group, i3S-Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde, Universidade do Porto, 4200-135 Porto, Portugal.
Animals (Basel). 2024 Jul 22;14(14):2131. doi: 10.3390/ani14142131.
In mice, hair growth follows a mosaic or wavy patterning. Therefore, synchronization of the hair growth cycle is required to adequately evaluate any trichogenic interventions pre-clinically. Depilation is the established method for synchronizing the growth phase of mouse hair follicles. When attempting to reproduce procedures reported in the literature, mice developed severe wounds. This led us not only to optimize the procedure, but also to test the procedure in other strains, namely and the F1 generation from crossed with ( mixed background), for which the hair growth cycle has not been ascertained yet. Here, we describe an optimized depilation procedure, using cold wax and an extra step to protect the animal skin that minimizes injury, improving experimental conditions and animal welfare in all strains. Moreover, our results show that, although hair cycle kinetics are similar in all the analyzed strains, and skins are morphologically different from skin, presenting an increased number and size of hair follicles in anagen, consistent to the higher hair density observed macroscopically. Altogether, the results disclose an optimized mouse depilation method that excludes the detrimental and confounding effects of skin injury in hair growth studies and reveals the hair cycle features of other mouse strains, supporting their use in hair growth pre-clinical studies.
在小鼠中，毛发生长呈镶嵌或波浪状模式。因此，在临床前充分评估任何促毛发生长干预措施需要同步毛发生长周期。拔毛是使小鼠毛囊生长阶段同步的既定方法。在尝试重现文献中报道的程序时，小鼠出现了严重伤口。这不仅促使我们优化该程序，还促使我们在其他品系中测试该程序，即[品系名称1]以及[品系名称1]与[品系名称2]杂交产生的F1代（混合背景），其毛发生长周期尚未确定。在此，我们描述一种优化的拔毛程序，使用冷蜡并增加一个保护动物皮肤的步骤，将损伤降至最低，改善所有品系的实验条件和动物福利。此外，我们的结果表明，尽管在所有分析的品系中毛发生长周期动力学相似，但[品系名称1]和[品系名称2]的皮肤在形态上与[品系名称3]的皮肤不同，在生长期毛囊数量和大小增加，这与宏观观察到的更高毛发密度一致。总之，这些结果揭示了一种优化的小鼠拔毛方法，该方法排除了皮肤损伤在毛发生长研究中的有害和混杂影响，并揭示了其他小鼠品系的毛发生长周期特征，支持它们在促毛发生长临床前研究中的应用。
