Another close-to-home image for today; this one was taken by Susanne, who sits right next to me these days, whilst she was doing her Diploma Thesis at the NMI Natural and Medical Science Institute at the University of Tuebingen (in Germany) three years ago.
Susanne's image shows a dorsal root ganglion from a chicken. You normally find dorsal root ganglia (or DRGs) just next to the spinal cord, and dorsal to it (towards the back. Like a dorsal fin! Anatomy aide-memoire!). The ganglia bit in the name means that it is a mass of neuron cell bodies. And it's the root of a spinal nerve: a whole bunch of neurons all leaving the spinal cord and traveling out to the periphery together. DRGs like this one here contain sensory neurons, the ones bringing information back to your brain. The neurons that take information out to your periphery (like the motor neurons in Friday's picture, which cause movement of skeletal muscles) leave via the other side of the spinal cord.
The green staining is showing neurons, growing and projecting outwards from the DRG. The blue staining is showing the nuclei of all the cells (most of which aren't neurons, so we can only see their nuclei).
Once again, for scale, the bar represents 500μm (0.05cm, so 16 times bigger than the last image!).
If you like the images leave me a comment, it would be a delight to hear from you. Or subscribe by hitting the 'subscribe to' link at the bottom of the page. It will put a bookmark on your toolbar and put posts in it! Amazing! I have just discovered this nifty trick (I am sure it has been around for relative eons, but there you go).
Laura
You are amazing with your blog ;). Thanks to share that with us!
ReplyDeleteAnna (guess which one! ja ja!).
I have just re-read this (and all your other posts) having just read about dorsal root ganglia on the train home last night. Please write more! (And thanks for the dorsal fin aide-memoire; do you have one for rostral & caudal?? So far all I have is heat rises so it's cauld lower down...)
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