Isolation of Growth Cones from Mouse Brain

Abstract

Growth cones are motile structures at the tips of growing neurites, which play an essential role in regulation of growth and navigation of growing axons and dendrites of neurons in the developing nervous system. This protocol describes isolation of growth cones from the brain tissue from young mice. Growth cones isolated using this protocol have been extensively characterized using electron microscopy (Pfenninger et al., 1983) and may be used for any kind of subsequent biochemical and/or functional analyses, including Western blot analysis of protein expression (Westphal et al., 2010), analysis of the activity of growth cone-accumulated enzymes (Leshchyns’ka et al., 2003; Li et al., 2013), and analysis of the endocytosis and exocytosis rates (Chernyshova et al., 2011).