Brain histology - microglia

Posted by Mondey , 20 May 2012 · 1,269 views

To visualize microglia and amyloid plaques in vivo, we established different staining protocols (including histology and immunohistology) to later evaluate microglia number after transplantation and also amyloid load. Top left is showing an immuno staining for amyloid and top right is an overview for microglia in the hippocampus.
The bottom pictures shows an example of a co-localization of activated microglia and amyloid (red = activated microglia; green: amyloid plaque; blue= tau). You can see that many activated microglia surround the amyloid plaques, however not amyloid is co-localised with microglia, so most likely the microglia surrounding the amyloid plaques did not phagocytose any of the amyloid.
Most of our measurements will take please in the hippocampus, one of the brain regions were many of the degenerative changes happen in Alzheimer. This picture shows a good overview of a hippocampus of an Alzheimer mice stained for amyloid.
In summary we have established all necessary methods for brain staining, tested the sterology method using non-transplanted mice and are now ready to transplant. We finally got the approval from our animal guys after waiting for 10 month (there are a bit over-correct here in Germany).