Hi everyone. I am grinding some brain tissues using a Tenbroeck tissue grinder. The grinder I am using is 7 mL. All of the documentation I have read online states that the grinding should be performed with gentle up and down and twisting motions. However, when I use this grinder, the suction generated by the buffer and tissue in the tube makes it very difficult to move the pestle out and in when grinding. Do I have a defective grinder, or is this normal? I am using a hypoosmotic buffer of 1% triton-X and 40 mM sodium citrate, trying to leave only the nuclei intact. Thanks for any help!
Grinders can also have different clearances between surfaces (depending on the purpose - e.g. size of organelles to remain undamaged) which affects how hard they will move when with a sample. May also depend on a sample, though.
I think people usually use Dounce and Potter-Elvehjem homogenizers for nuclei, mitochondria and other organelles - rather than the Tenbroeck one.
Actually, (after my Dounce homogenizer has cracked) I've used a ~7 ml TenBroeck grinder (bought a cheap one from ebay) to grind about 1 ml pile of whole Drosophila flies a while ago: it was also moving very hard, so eventually I just switched to a 14 ml plastic tube which has left a lot of space around the glass shaft. This probably reduced the yield of disrupted cells but probably also the shearing of mitochondria that I've used in my assays.
Thanks for you answer! Eventually I purchased a few grinders from a different brand with more clearance. Worked much better, with much less suction!
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