Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2014 Feb 4:144:w13914.
doi: 10.4414/smw.2014.13914.

A revival of parabiosis in biomedical research

Alexander Eggel  1 , Tony Wyss-Coray
Affiliations
Review

A revival of parabiosis in biomedical research

Alexander Eggel et al. Swiss Med Wkly. .

Abstract

Modern medicine wields the power to treat large numbers of diseases and injuries most of us would have died from just a hundred years ago, yet many of the most devastating diseases of our time are still untreatable. Chronic conditions of age such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis or Alzheimer's disease turn out to be of a complexity that may require transformative ideas and paradigms to understand and treat them. Parabiosis, which is characterised by a shared blood supply between two surgically connected animals, may just provide such a transformative experimental paradigm. Although forgotten and shunned now in many countries, it has contributed to major breakthroughs in tumour biology, endocrinology and transplantation research in the past century. Interestingly, recent studies from the United States and Britain are reporting stunning advances in stem cell biology and tissue regeneration using parabiosis between young and old mice, indicating a possible revival of this paradigm. We review here briefly the history of parabiosis and discuss its utility to study physiological and pathophysiological processes. We argue that parabiosis is a technique that should enjoy wider acceptance and application, and that policies should be revisited to allow its use in biomedical research.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Parabiosis history and modern use
(a) The annual number of publications using parabiosis is shown from 1860–2013. Several studies are highlighted as they provided groundbreaking findings. (b) Publications including parabiosis experiments are listed for different countries. All values have been extracted from http://www.gopubmed.org
Figure 2
Figure 2. Circulatory system in parabiosis
Organism A and B share a common blood supply, which spontaneously develops through anastomosis post-surgery. Organisms with different physiologic conditions may be used for parabiosis in order to assess the systemic effect of one organism on a particular tissue of interest in its attached partner.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Heterochronic parabiosis
Using heterochronic pairings of young (A) and old (B) mice allows assessment of the effect of a young systemic environment on a particular local tissue of interest in the aged partner and vice versa. Isochronic pairings (AA or BB) are important controls to exclude surgery-related observations and to determine age-related changes in the systemic environment. Briefly, systemic body fluids such as blood, lymph or CSF are collected, assessed with OMICS tools such as protein, lipid or hormone arrays and analyzed for differential levels of soluble factors pre- and post-parabiosis. A particular tissue of interest is isolated, phenotypically characterized by flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry or epi-/genetic measures and analyzed for parabiosis-induced phenotypic changes. The integration of these data leads to the identification of individual candidate factors or cells that can subsequently be tested in a suitable mouse model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Edmonds LD, Layde PM. Conjoined twins in the united states, 1970–1977. Teratology. 1982 Jun;25(3):301–8. - PubMed
    1. Spencer R. Anatomic description of conjoined twins: a plea for standardized terminology. J Pediatr Surg. 1996 Jul;31(7):941–4. - PubMed
    1. Conboy MJ, Conboy IM, Rando TA. Heterochronic parabiosis: historical perspective and methodological considerations for studies of aging and longevity. Aging Cell. 2013 Jun;12(3):525–30. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Harris WA. Axonal pathfinding in the absence of normal pathways and impulse activity. J Neurosci. 1984 Apr;4(4):1153–62. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Demy DL, Ranta Z, Giorgi J-M, Gonzalez M, Herbomel P, Kissa K. Generating parabiotic zebrafish embryos for cell migration and homing studies. Nat Meth. 2013 Mar;10(3):256–8. - PubMed

Publication types