Drawing Blood from Rats through the Saphenous Vein and by Cardiac Puncture

Hello, I'm Christine Beaton. I'm an assistant researcher in George Chen's lab in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California at Irvine. And in the video you are just about to watch with the help of Adriana Garcia, a graduate student in the laboratory.

I'm going to show you two techniques for drawing blood from rats. The first technique we are going to show you is how to draw blood from the saphenous vein. And this is a very useful technique if you want to draw small amounts of blood from rat without anesthesia.

For example, if you're doing a pharmacokinetic study, which requires small amounts of blood but are taken at regular intervals. The second technique we're going to show you is drawing blood by cardiac puncture. This is a terminal technique, so the rat has to be sacrificed at the end of the blood draw.

But the advantage of this technique is that it can give you much larger amounts of blood, several milliliters. So once we've shaped the area, we put regular skin lotion mostly to avoid any fur from flying around and coming in the tube and also coagulating the blood. Then with my thumb, I'm going to put a point of pressure so that the vein bulges out a little, and then Adriana is going to puncture the vein and sometimes it rolls around so we don't get it, in which case we poke again.

So now that we've punctured the vein drops of blood come out at regular intervals, so we scoop them up with micro tube and we do that until we have enough blood for our asay or until no more blood comes out. And depending on on the rat and on how good the puncture was, we get more or less blood, blood out of the brain. And to help more blood come out, we pump with the leg.

This is the amount of blood we typically get from a ous vein blood draw. Now I'm ready to show you how to perform kaun. And for this procedure, what we really need is only one five mil slipped plastic syringe and the 23 gauge needle.

So the rat is deeply exercise with alane, and I put a mask, which is a syringe with a Kim wipe containing alane to make sure the rat doesn't wake up. I'm right-handed, so my left index, I put at the level of the solar plexus to position myself. And then to find the heart, I go about one centimeter higher, up slightly to the right, my syringe with about a 45 degree angle.

And if I'm in the heart, I should have a steady floor of blood. If I'm not in the heart, I can go deeper or more to the surface. And using this technique, I should be able to drop several mils of blood from one given rat.

Of course, when the heart stops, the blood flow will stop at the same time. So you need the rat deeply anthesis, but you don't want it to die too fast. When the syringe is full, I disconnected from the needle and I put it in a tube and I put it down slowly to avoid hemolysis because I want to be able to use my serum later on for tissue culture or for diluting my drugs from injections.

And since I left the needle in place, I can try and see if I can draw any more blood from that hand. And again, if the flow is very small, like now, I'll move the needle up and down to see if I can find a spot where there's more blood to draw like. And of course, once you found the spot, you don't want to move the cell engine.

So we've just shown you how to draw blood from rats, either from the ous vein or from cardiac puncture. So good luck with your experiments.