Can I pool mouse blood from different individuals of the same strain without regard to any factors? Or do I need to consider something like mouse blood types etc.?
Hey Steffen,
in principle, you can pool murine blood samples (in WT mice no considerations of blood type is necessary), BUT consider several factors before:
-try not to pool male and female samples due to physiological differences (hormone levels, glucose etc), unless you are pooling early postnatal samples (up to ~ day 10)
-be aware that you loose a lot of statistical power
-pooling is regularily performed in developmental toxicology when available blood amounts are very limited but pool only as few as you really need to perform your analysis
Hope that already helps a bit,
best regards, Geertje
It depends on the purpose of pooling, for looking for rare cell populations in the blood by flow cytometry, if all mice are treated the same way, then yes.
Pooling is done to obtain sufficient blood anount for analysis.
I recommend to consider blood type or use an anticouagulant, otherwise, you may have clot in whole blood or serum.
As other adviced, do not mix male and females