Freeze injury of the tibialis anterior muscle

Freeze injury is physically induced by exposing skeletal muscle to an extremely cold probe, and results in a robust degenerative and inflammatory response. One unique aspect of freeze injury is that it destroys not only the muscle fiber cells, but also all of the mononuclear cells in the zone of injury. Repair of the muscle is accomplished by satellite cells from outside of the zone of injury, which must migrate in and which may interact with inflammatory cells, hence the length of time before apparent histological recovery of the most damaged zone is typically somewhat longer with freeze injury than with other physical or chemical methods of injury. In this chapter, we present a detailed protocol for the freeze injury of the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle in mouse.