Liver snips. A simple, rapid and reproducible method for studying metabolism in small fragments of tissue, as applied to glucuronidation in rat liver.

A simple, rapid method is described of preparing intact cells as small (about 2mm) pieces of organized tissue capable of performing synthetic metabolic functions. It has been applied to the study of glucuronidation in rat liver. In this process, snips appear less damaged, more versatile and more active than tissue slices and yield results of reproducibility comparable with those with homogenates. From a comparison with the literature, snips glucuronidate the substrates employed at a rate much the same as in perfused preparations and some 30% less than the rate in isolated-hepatocyte suspensions; the advantages they offer in certain situations over these two techniques are discussed.