Submitted on February 22, 2008
Revised on March 31, 2008
Accepted on April 13, 2008
Pancreatic contamination of mesenteric adipose tissue samples can be avoided by adjusted dissection procedures
Robert Caesar and Christian A. Drevon
Department of Nutrition, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo 0316
Corresponding Author: l.e.r.caesar{at}medisin.uio.no
Mesenteric adipose tissue, located in the mesenterium of the intestines, is believed to play a central role in the development of obesity-related diseases. We have found that mesenteric fat samples harvested from rodents frequently are of poor quality exhibiting partly degraded RNA. To investigate the background for this observation we screened adipose tissue samples from two independent studies on rodents for markers of different tissues and cell-types. We found that mesenteric adipose tissue samples of low quality are “contaminated” by pancreatic tissue. To locate the affected area we dissected the mesenteric fat depots from 14 mice and measured abundance of pancreas-specific gene-expression and amylase activity. As expected, we observed that the proximal section of the mesenterium located near pancreas, expressed pancreatic markers whereas the distal sections did not. Approximately one-third of the mesenteric adipose tissue depots contained pancreatic tissue. Because the boundary between pancreas and mesenteric fat can not be easily distinguished during dissection, we conclude that investigators should routinely exclude the proximal section of the mesenteric adipose tissue depot to avoid pancreatic contamination.
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