Snapshots in Neuroscience: Intestinal Myenteric Ganglion

These images have been selected to showcase the art that neuroscience research can create.

As described by the authors: “The image shows immunostaining of the adult mouse small intestinal myenteric ganglion with antibodies against two proteins long considered to be neuronal markers for all the neurons in the enteric nervous system. In red is PGP9.5, which labels somas, or cell bodies, as well as the nerve fibers of neurons. In green is Hu, which is localized in the soma of myenteric neurons. Cell nuclei, in blue, are visualized by the nuclear dye DAPI. This image shows that both Hu and PGP9.5 expectedly label the same set of cells within the myenteric ganglion.

“Our paper addresses a long-standing controversy about the presence of neurogenesis in the adult gut by showing that a subset of Hu+ cells (green) are mitotic and hence those cells should be annotated correctly as mitotic neuroblasts. This suggests that the widely accepted definition of PGP9.5 and Hu as markers of neurons in the enteric system should be expanded to include that they are also markers of mitotic neuroblasts. By using immunostaining with the mitotic marker phosphor-histone H3, confocal microscopy observing the presence of binucleated Hu-labeled cells, and flow analyses on labeled neuronal nuclei, we showed that ~10% of Hu-labeled cells are mitotic. Thus, all our current and prior literature that has assumed these markers to exclusively label mature neurons may need to be re-interpreted.

“This image was taken using confocal microscopy under 40X immersion lens and immunostaining with antibodies against PGP9.5 and ANNA1-patient sera containing antibodies against Hu.”

This confocal microscopic image depicts an adult mouse small intestinal myenteric ganglion. In red is PGP9.5, which is an antibody for somas and nerve fibers of neurons. In green is Hu, which labels the soma of myenteric neurons. The nuclear dye DAPI, in blue, labels all cell nuclei. Image credit: Subhash Kulkarni.

Read the full article:

Detection of Mitotic Neuroblasts Provides Additional Evidence of Steady-State Neurogenesis in the Adult Small Intestinal Myenteric Plexus
Anastazja M. Gorecki, Jared Slosberg, Su Min Hong, Philippa Seika, Srinivas N. Puttapaka, Blake Migden, Anton Gulko, Alpana Singh, Chengxiu Zhang, Rohin Gurumurthy, and Subhash Kulkarni