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Saturday, January 16, 2010
Golgi impregnation

Golgi impregnation is an effective but capricious method to detect the soma along with entire dendritic arbors and dendritic spines of the neurons. The method was initially developed by Italian physician Camillo Golgi, which then became famously used by Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal to discover a series of discoveries about the interior architecture of the nervous system.


Since the dendritic arbors occupy about 90-95% of total volume of the neuron, and the dendritic spines are the major sites for synaptic transmission between neurons, the Golgi impregnation thus becomes a useful tool to examine morphological properties of the nervous system. This significance has been further amplified by the fact that the standard histopathological methods are not able to stain dendrites and/or spines. As a consequence, neural staining methods are unable to detect early changes in neurodegenerative processes involving dendritic atrophy and spine loss and completely ignore neuroplastic changes involving enhanced dendritic branching and/or new functional or aberrant spine formation.

While this method makes feasible for us to "visualize" these gorgeous neurons in our brain (and spinal cord), they are just the "pictures" without providing any "quantitative" information of their morphology. Instead of using traditional "camera lucida" under scope to vigorously and and tediously hand-trace these neurons, modern microscopy and computer technologies jointly provide an effective platform that allows the neuroscientist (or more precisely, morphologists) to not only visualize but also "quantify" the characteristics of their morphology, such as the length of their dendritic tress and the numbers of the spines.

With all of the quantitative information or numbers that describe neuron morphology,
the computer programs are able to convert these numbers to reconstruct single neurons (or
called 3D "quantitative" neurons). This advancement not only helps scientists gain more
understanding of our nervous system, it also provides a new way of exploration in modern arts. : )! Of course, this is not an easy step and will still require a lot of work via high-end microscopy and technology, which will be posted in a separate topic.
Please click here to see the animation!!
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