 Most often tissue is destroyed rather than solution or a fixative in preparing the

removed. brain for histological examination

 The animal’s behavior is then observed to 4. Microtome (my krow tome)

determine what part of the body is controlled by
a. an instrument that produces very thin
that particular region of the brain.
slices of body tissues
 To verify the precise location of the brain 5. Staining
damage (or cannula placement, etc)
a. If you looked at an unstained section of brain
 One of the most important research methods tissue under a microscope, you would be able to see the
used to investigate brain functions involves outlines of some large cellular masses and the more
destroying part of the brain and evaluating the prominent fiber bundles.
animal’s subsequent behavior.
b. However, no fine details would be revealed.
 This method is called experimental ablation
c. For this reason, the study of microscopic
(from the Latin word ablatus, a “carrying away”).
neuroanatomy requires special histological stains.
 In most cases, experimental ablation does not
d. Researchers have developed many different
involve the removal of brain tissue; instead, the
stains to identify specific substances within and outside
researcher destroys some tissue and leaves it in
of cells.
place.
e. For verifying the location of a brain lesion, we
 Experimental ablation is the oldest method used
will use one of the simplest: a cell-body stain.
in neuroscience, and it remains in common use
today. f. In the late nineteenth century, Franz Nissl, a
German neurologist, discovered that a dye known as
Histological Methods
methylene blue would stain the cell bodies of brain
• After producing a brain lesion and observing its tissue.
effects on an animal’s behavior, we must slice
g. The material that takes up the dye, known as the
and stain the brain so that we can observe it
Nissl substance, consists of RNA, DNA, and associated
under the microscope and see the location of the
proteins located in the nucleus and scattered, in the
lesion.
form of granules, in the cytoplasm.
• Brain lesions often miss the mark, so we have to
h. Many dyes besides methylene blue can be used
verify the precise location of the brain damage
to stain cell bodies found in slices of the brain, but the
after testing the animal behaviorally.
most frequently used is cresyl violet.
• To do so, we must fix, slice, stain, and examine
i. Incidentally, the dyes were not developed
the brain. Together, these procedures are
specifically for histological purposes; they were originally
referred to as histological methods.
formulated for use in dyeing cloth.
1. Fixative
j. The discovery of cell-body stains made it possible
a. a chemical such as formalin; used to to identify nuclear masses in the brain.
prepare and preserve body tissue
k. Figure 5.8 shows a frontal section of a cat brain
2. Formalin (for ma lin) stained with cresyl violet. Note that you can observe
fiber bundles by their lighter appearance; they do not
a. the aqueous solution of formaldehyde
take up the stain. (See Figure 5.8.)
gas; the most commonly used tissue
fixative l. The stain is not selective for neural cell bodies;
all cells are stained, neurons and glia alike. It is up to the
3. Perfusion (per few zhun)
investigator to determine which is which—by size, shape,
a. the process by which an animal’s blood and location.
is replaced by a fluid such as a saline
6. Electron Microscopy
a. The light microscope is limited in its ability to • Figure 5.12 illustrates the use of confocal
resolve extremely small details. microscopy of the hippocampus of living
anesthetized mice (Mizrahi et al., 2004).
b. Because of the nature of light itself,
• The skull was opened, and the overlying
magnification of more than approximately 1500 times
cortex was dissected away so that images
does not add any detail.
could be taken of the interior of the
c. To see such small anatomical structures as hippocampus.
synaptic vesicles and details of cell organelles, • Molecular genetic methods had been used
investigators must use a transmission electron to insert a gene into the animals’ DNA that
microscope. produced a fluorescent protein dye in certain
neurons in the hippocampus
d. A beam of electrons is passed through a thin • Mizrahi and his colleagues obtained images
slice of the tissue to be examined. of individual dendrites of these neurons
e. The beam of electrons casts a shadow of the before and after they induced seizures in the
tissue on a fluorescent screen, which can be animals by administering excitatory drugs.
photographed or scanned into a computer. • Images made before the seizures are shown
in green, and images made four to five hours
f. Electron photomicrographs produced in this way after the seizures are shown in red.
can provide information about structural details on the • As you can see, the animals in which the
order of a few tens of nanometers. seizures were induced showed a loss of
• Transmission Electron Microscope dendritic spines (arrows), but there was no
• a microscope that passes a focused loss of spines in control animals. (See Figure
beam of electrons through thin slices of 5.12.)
tissue to reveal extremely small details Tracing Neural Connections
• Scanning Electron Microscope
• a microscope that provides three- 1. Tracing Efferent Axons
dimensional information about the • Anterograde Labeling Method (ann ter oh
shape of the surface of a small object by grade)
scanning the object with a thin beam of
electrons • a histological method that labels the
• Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope axons and terminal buttons of neurons
• a microscope that provides high- whose cell bodies are located in a
resolution images of various depths of particular region
thick tissue that contains fluorescent
• PHA-L
molecules by scanning the tissue with
light from a laser beam • phaseolus vulgaris leukoagglutinin; a
7. Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy protein derived from kidney beans and
• Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope - a used as an anterograde tracer; taken up
microscope that provides high-resolution by dendrites and cell bodies and carried
images of various depths of thick tissue that to the ends of the axons
contains fluorescent molecules by scanning
• Immunocytochemical Method
the tissue with light from a laser beam
• Conventional microscopy or transmission • a histological method that uses
electron microscopy requires that the tissue radioactive antibodies or antibodies
be sliced into thin sections. bound with a dye molecule to indicate
• The advent of the confocal laser scanning the presence of particular proteins of
microscope makes it possible to see details peptides
inside thick sections of tissue or even in slabs
of tissue maintained in tissue cultures—or in • Immunocytochemical methods take
the upper layers of tissue in the exposed advantage of the immune reaction.
living brain.
• The body’s immune system has the • a weakened form of a pig herpes virus
ability to produce antibodies in used for retrograde transneuronal
response to antigens. Antigens are tracing; labels a series of neurons that
proteins (or peptides), such as those are interconnected synaptically
found on the surface of bacteria or
• Herpes Simplex Virus
viruses.
• a form of herpes virus used for
• Antibodies, which are also proteins, are
anterograde transneuronal tracing;
produced by white blood cells to
labels a series of neurons that are
destroy invading microorganisms.  
interconnected synaptically
• Antibodies either are secreted by white
• The virus is injected directly into a brain
blood cells or are located on their
region, is taken up by neurons there,
surface, in the same way that
and infects them. The virus spreads
neurotransmitter receptors are located
throughout the infected neurons and is
on the surface of neurons.
eventually released by the terminal
• When the antigens present on the buttons, passing the infection to other
surface of an invading microorganism neurons that form synaptic connections
come into contact with the antibodies with them.
that recognize them, the antibodies
Studying the Structure of the Living Human Brain
trigger an attack on the invader by the
white blood cells.   • In past years a researcher might have studied
the behavior of a person with brain damage and
2. Tracing Afferent Axons
never found out exactly where the lesion was
To discover the parts of the brain that are involved located.
in the “upstream” components of the neural
• The only way to be sure was to obtain the
circuitry, we need to find the inputs of its afferent
patient’s brain when he or she died and
connections.
examine slices of it under a microscope—but it
To do so, we will employ a retrograde labeling was often impossible to do this.
method.
• Sometimes the patient outlived the researcher.
Retrograde means “moving backward.” Retrograde
• Sometimes the patient moved out of town.
labeling methods employ chemicals that are taken
up by terminal buttons and carried back through • Sometimes (often, perhaps) the family refused
the axons toward the cell bodies. permission for an autopsy.
The method for identifying the afferent inputs to a • Because of these practical problems, study of
particular region of the brain is similar to the the behavioral effects of damage to specific
method used for identifying its efferents. parts of the human brain made rather slow
progress.
• Retrograde Labeling Method
• a histological method that labels cell • Recent advances in X-ray techniques and
bodies that give rise to the terminal computers have led to the development of
buttons that form synapses with cells in several methods for studying the anatomy of
a particular region the living brain.
 
• Fluorogold (flew roh gold) • These advances permit researchers to study the
• a dye that serves as a retrograde label; location and extent of brain damage while the
taken up by terminal buttons and patient is still living.
carried back to the cell bodies • The first method that was developed is called
• Pseudorabies Virus computerized tomography (CT) (from the Greek
for tomos, “cut,” and graphein, “to write”).
1. Computerized Tomography (CT) molecules in bundles of white matter will not
be random, but will tend to be in a direction
• the use of a device that employs a computer to
parallel to the axons that make up the bundles.
analyze data obtained by a scanning beam of x-

rays to produce a two-dimensional picture of a
“slice” through the body
 
• This procedure, usually referred to as a CT scan,
works as follows: The patient’s head is placed in
a large doughnut-shaped ring.
 
• The ring contains an X-ray tube and, directly
opposite it (on the other side of the patient’s
head), an X-ray detector.

• The X-ray beam passes through the patient’s

head, and the detector measures the amount of
radioactivity that gets through it.

• The beam scans the head from all angles, and a

computer translates the numbers it receives
from the detector into pictures of the skull and
its contents.

2. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

 a technique whereby the interior of the body
can be accurately imaged; involves the
interaction between radio waves and a strong
magnetic field
 The MRI scanner resembles a CT scanner, but it
does not use X-rays.
 Instead, it passes an extremely strong magnetic
field through the patient’s head. When a
person’s head is placed in this strong magnetic
field, the nuclei of spinning hydrogen atoms
align themselves to the magnetic field.
3. Diffusion Tensor Imaging (dti)
 an imaging method that uses a modified MRI
scanner to reveal bundles of myelinated axons
in the living human brain
 MRI scans distinguish between regions of gray
matter and white matter, so major fiber
bundles (such as the corpus callosum) can be
seen.
 However, small fiber bundles are not visible on
these scans. A special modification of the MRI
scanner permits the visualization of even small
bundles of fibers and the tracing of fiber tracts.
 Above absolute zero, all molecules move in
random directions because of thermal
agitation; the higher the temperature, the
faster the random movement.
 Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) takes advantage
of the fact that the movement of water