Does microwaving enhance the Golgi methods? A quantitative analysis of disparate staining patterns in the cerebral cortex

As a family of techniques, the Golgi methods have long been used for studying the morphology and structure of the central nervous system. Due to their capricious nature, many modifications have been employed to improve the reliability and quality of the technique, including the recent addition of mi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of neuroscience methods 2003-04, Vol.124 (2), p.145-155
Main Authors: Zhang, Hong, Weng, Shih-Jen, Hutsler, Jeffrey J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Cerebral Cortex - cytology
Female
Glial
Histology
Human
Humans
Male
Microwaves
Middle Aged
Neuronal
Pathology
Rat
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Silver Staining - methods
Silver Staining - statistics & numerical data
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:As a family of techniques, the Golgi methods have long been used for studying the morphology and structure of the central nervous system. Due to their capricious nature, many modifications have been employed to improve the reliability and quality of the technique, including the recent addition of microwave energy. In the present study, we evaluated the effectiveness of adding microwave energy to two Golgi methods: the Golgi-Cox method and the rapid Golgi method. These methods were selected for their widespread use in animal research and human postmortem studies. Control tissue was compared to tissue exposed to microwave energy for varying lengths of time during the chromating step of both methods. As assessed by stereological cell counts and qualitative observation, the addition of microwave energy improved the quality of the impregnations and the number of labeled profiles in both methods up to a specific limit of exposure. Surprisingly, increases in the number of profiles were often the result of increased non-neuronal staining at the expense of neuronal staining. This result appears to be due to the fact that different classes of labeled profiles displayed distinct staining time courses.
ISSN:0165-0270
1872-678X
DOI:10.1016/S0165-0270(03)00002-5