I routinely sacrifice B6 mice for harvesting spleens for various usage. Occasionally I encountered some spleens the color looks abnormal: They are very dark(black) at one end, in some case it can be up to 1/2 length of the spleen.
This phenomenon is more obvious in fully sex matured mice (>3-4 months), and is rare in very young mice (4-8 weeks). They can be observed in naïve mice, as well as immunized mice. I never tried to count the percentage of the "black spleen" over the total mice sacrificed, but my overall impression is 1 out of 10 spleens might be such "black spleen".
I just wonder why some B6 mice have such "black spleen". Does it mean the mouse is abnormal? Has anyone observed such "black spleen" in other strains of mice?
Hello
These articles explain to you this phenomenon :
http://www.actabp.pl/pdf/3_2015/2015_1053.pdf
http://www.actabp.pl/pdf/2_2005/433.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/19543555/
Dear Saleh,
Thank you very much for your reply, which is very helpful and informative.
We did observe that immune cells (such as CD4+ cells) from the "black" spleen might be functionally different from those from the normal one. To avoid unnecessary troubles, we discarded the black spleen and did not use them for critical experiments.
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