Comparative Morphology of Dendritic Arbors in Populations of Purkinje Cells in Mouse Sulcus and Apex

Figure 1

Anatomical sampling, confocal microscopic imaging, and morphological reconstruction of PC dendritic arbors expressing green fluorescent protein. (a) Sulcus lobules VIII-IX and apex lobule VIII were systematically imaged from cerebellar sagittal slices near the midline (vermis). Scale bar: 200 μm. (b) Young mouse (12-day) PC dendritic arbors from apex and (d) sulcus. (c) Old mouse (150-day) PC arbors from apex and (e) sulcus (Scale bars: 20 μm). (f) Example of confocal image demonstrating the distance between neighboring PC dendrites (colored dendrites viewed from the side in zoomed image) as a result of image acquisition with a 0.25 μm step size in the 𝑧-direction (𝑧: image stack depth; 𝑦/𝑥: dendritic tree height and width in the sagittal slice, resp.) (g) Example of dendritic arbor tracing using the adapted Neurolucida (MBF Bioscience) contour function. The extracted geometry is a set of coordinates in 3D space, which can also be applied to nonplanar dendritic structures. (h) Example of neighboring PC dendritic arbor geometries populating the apex. PC somata are 13–20 μm.