How can you make the quantification of the neuronal density in the hippocampus?
This is a very tricky question to answer. First off, do you want general neuronal density? In that case, choosing a marker that stains neurons (like NeuN) would be helpful. You would have to prepare slices of the hippocampus, preferably very thin (like 20-30µm using a cryostat) and do the actual counting in the regions of interest, counting every Nth slice (N is up to you) as counting all is just impossible.
There's also a way to do cellular counts in slices which does an unbiased estimation of cells. I am personally not familiar with it, but it seems to be called unbiased stereological analysis (something like that was used in an analysis in a paper coming out of my former lab and in their paper the technique used was called optical fractionator method). This is briefly described and referenced in the following article:
Glutamate corelease promotes growth and survival of midbrain dopamine neurons.
Fortin GM, Bourque MJ, Mendez JA, Leo D, Nordenankar K, Birgner C, Arvidsson E, Rymar VV, Bérubé-Carrière N, Claveau AM, Descarries L, Sadikot AF, Wallén-Mackenzie Å, Trudeau LÉ
I believe you would do well to read that and the main reference in the 'methods' section and/or contact Dr Sadikot who I think is the person who has the most knowledge of this technique.
I hope this helps you a bit!
Optical density (Image J) is also usefull for quantify neuronal density in the hippocampus when it is used in association with methods mentioned above.
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