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Pronounced loss of cell nuclei and anisotropic deformation of thick sections
Author(s) -
Andersen,
Gundersen
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of microscopy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.569
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1365-2818
pISSN - 0022-2720
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2818.1999.00555.x
Subject(s) - vibratome , shrinkage , nucleolus , section (typography) , deformation (meteorology) , sampling (signal processing) , cross section (physics) , anisotropy , microtome , optics , anatomy , materials science , chemistry , physics , composite material , nucleus , biology , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , detector , advertising , business , microbiology and biotechnology , central nervous system
The local deformation and variations in section thickness are studied in 100‐μm thick vibratome sections of well‐fixed human brain tissue. During processing, including drying on glass slides, the section thickness is reduced to less than half, but close to the edges there is less shrinkage of the section thickness. Close to both surfaces there is a pronounced reduction in the number of neuronal nucleoli. At the scale of the original section, the upper 15 μm and the lower 10 μm are depleted. The loss is most pronounced at the upper surface, which is unprotected during processing. In the central 70% of the section height, where one would ordinarily use an optical disector for sampling, there is no indication of non‐uniform shrinkage. The simplest explanation for the observed loss of nucleoli is that all cells opened by the knife may lose their nuclei across an unprotected section surface. The observations do not generalize to other tissues and other preparation techniques, but illustrate the magnitude of some of the problems for uniform sampling and unbiased estimation in very thick sections. The uniform optical disector sampling of nucleoli in thick sections, as opposed to that of cell nuclei, raises a special problem, which is discussed briefly.