Does electroporation efficacy change when electroporating axons rather than soma? Is it possible to target a pupulation of neurons by electroporating their axons (which are all bundled together)? Has it ever been shown that electroporation works just as well in every "compartment" of the neuronal cell?
in principle this should be possible, but you would need to be sure that localised electroporation is achieved. probably the easiest way would be using some microelectrodes. there are two papers which come to my mind and i suggest you look at:
Teruel, M.N., Blanpied, T., Shen, K., Augustine, G.J, and T. Meyer. (1999). A versatile microporation technique for the transfection of CNS neurons. J. Neuroscience Methods 93: 37-48.
Teruel, M.N. and T. Meyer. (1997). Electroporation-induced formation of individual calcium entry sites in the cell body and filipodia of adherent cells. Biophys. J. 73: 1785-1796.
I know you can do single cell electroporation, but I've never seen anyone try that with axons only. Honestly, I don't think it would be terribly efficient if you're doing the usual plasmid electroporation, as it would require the plasmids to get all the way back to the soma through the axons, before you got anything useful out of them.
I think Marco will need to tell us what he wants to achieve with electroporation. gene electrotransfer or something else?
I apologyze for the confusion..I do not need to visualize the axons only, but the whole cell. My issue is that I cannot target the soma because they are scattered all over, but all their axons get together in the so-called antenno-cerebral tract, which is instead a clear target. So I was simply asking if to electroporate the cells where the axons get together could work or if, for some physical properties of the neuronal processes, electroporation is less efficient there than in the soma.
The question is not so much whether axons can be electroporated, but what you intend to electroporate them with. If possible, injecting a tracer dye into the axon bundle might be far more efficient than electroporation if you simply want to label their soma.
As I've never worked with tracer dyes, I would not know, but I'm sure there are a number of neuro labs working on connectome-related research that you could contact. Good luck.
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