I'm working on establishing an murine infection model of the Prototheca algae. Not much is known about the dynamics of the infection, nor the induced immune response. I'd like to use the LEGENDplex Mouse Inflammation panel to measure levels of the cytokines in serum of sacrificed mice, previously infected with the algae via either three routes (intraperitoneal, intramammary and subcutaneously). However, I'm not sure what would be the best time point of collecting the serum, sufficient for infection to develop and to observe the change in cytokine levels.
Before collecting serum from mice post infection, you need to optimize the time, for which you need to do an experiment with a group of animals by infecting these and taking blood at different time points. Extract RNA from the blood and do real PCR for any inflammation cytokines gene. So that you may reach to a conclusion about time points to sacrifice mice.
Attaching a paper in which they sacrificed mice at 4 day.
As a starting point.. depends on what cytokines you want to measure and the purpose of the experiment.
So... it depends... For the innate cytokines, like TNFa, IL-6,and IL-1b.. depending on the dose of the infectious inoculum, systemic elevation of these 3 can be seen as early as 4-6 hours. If this is a non-lethal infection, 24hrs is always a good time point to start with. And then to track the infection course, multiple time point are suggested.
Also, if you are only collecting serum, and I'm not sure how much volume the kit requires, you can technically just bleed your mice without sacrificing them.