Hi!
I am looking at cortical neurons in coronal sections from mice expressing Thy-YFP and a top secret genetic manipulation :)
I noticed these vacuoles in the apical dendrites of most of the neurons, and was wondering if anyone with an experienced eye can tell me if these look like some sort of artifact? The brains were perfused, fixed, sunk in sucrose, frozen, and sectioned on a microtome. Ice crystals? Freeze thaw damage?
I don't have a wildtype to compare it to right this second due to technical difficulties, but am impatient and thought I'd ask all of you first, ESPECIALLY because of what I found out when I googled apical dendrite vacuoles. Thanks!
Sara
I am not an expert in neurology, but familiar with general microscopy. My best guess is that the vacoules are not artefacts or from processing errors as they appear in (an almost) regular pattern. So it must be a deformed structure due to drug/chemical/disease prior to fixing.
Given the characteristic form of vacuoles, and the fact that Thy1 (CD90) may be expressed on many mammalian cell types, including neurons, thymocytes, T cells, endothelial cells and fibroblasts, it seems to me that there is a blood capillary in the photo. Can you give true dimensions?
They are definitely apical dendrites and not vasculature, i just didnt image the cell body here :) They are all extending from neuronal soma
the image needs to be adjusted to have a better resolution. This will help to make the correct observation and perhaps conclusion.
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