PHYSCI 111A Lecture 4: Critique Week 4
18 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
From pathological examining of diseased human tissue they saw loss of spinal corn anterior horn cells (ahc"s), less ventral root large diameter axons, and atrophy of myofibers in muscles. However, at the end- stage they could not determine, which of these events occurred first. They were able to deduce that ahc loss occurred later in sma development using previous studies on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (als) ahc loss and their own research. Throughout their experiments, kong and colleagues used sma 7 mice. Cryostat sections of flash frozen muscle tissue show myofibers morphology and diameter. Immunohistochemistry involving antibody-antigen affinity and dissected muscles, allowed them to conduct whole mount stains of the tibialis anterior and diaphragm muscle nmj"s. Muscle fixation was extremely useful for examining specific sections of tissue and confocal microscopes were used to construct an image of the nmj. The number of perforations observed for each nmj can then be an indicator for postsynaptic complexity.
