I am performing plaque assay from the spleen of mice infected with virus. I am facing a problem that in few mice i am getting plaques but in other mice samples i am not getting any plaque or less plaques in comparison to other mice of same group. I am not able identify the problem. I am washing spleen with pbs after collection and immediately storing this in liquid nitrogen. After this I am homogenizing spleen and performing plaque assay. Any help or suggestions will be appreciated. Thanking you in advance.
Hi there!
My first question is what virus are you using?
The virus may just cause a "patchy" or a non-unified infection in the tissue. For example, influenza has a very patchy infection rate in the lungs, so if you only take the right lung, the viral titers may be skewed and very different from mice in the same group. I do not know if this could be a similar situation with your model.
Additionally, when I do plaque assay on influenza infected tissues, I typically process the tissue fresh and then freeze in liquid nitrogen or in the -80°C freezer until I am ready to run the plaque assay.
Hope this helps!
Hello Jessica, Thanks for answering my question. I am working on dengue virus mainly DENV2 and DENV4 strains. I am taking complete spleen and performing plaque assay with fresh tissue after homogenization.