Morphological and distributional properties of SMI‐32 immunoreactive ganglion cells in the rat retina

Autor: Kang Huang, Liping Wang, Moxuan Luo, Xiaotao Li, Huiying Tan
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Comparative Neurology. 530:1276-1287
ISSN: 1096-9861
0021-9967
Popis: SMI-32 is widely used to identify entire populations of alpha retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and several SMI-32+ RGC subsets have been studied thoroughly in rodents. However, due to the thick cover of SMI-32+ neurofilaments, the morphology of SMI-32+ RGCs in the central retinal region is obscured and rarely described. Moreover, SMI-32 labels more than one morphological RGC type and the full morphological characteristics and distribution of SMI-32+ RGCs have yet to be discovered. Here, using intracellular neurobiotin injections combined with SMI-32 antibody staining, we investigated morphological and distributional properties of the entire SMI-32+ RGCs population in the rat retina. We found that SMI-32+ RGCs were evenly distributed throughout the rat retina. We compared the morphological features of SMI-32+ ON and OFF cells in the central, middle, and peripheral retinal regions. We found that SMI-32+ RGCs in different regions have distinct characteristics, such as the soma area, the dendritic field area and Sholl analysis of ON cells and OFF cells revealed significant differences between each region. We classified SMI-32+ RGCs into five clusters based on morphological features and found that a majority of SMI-32+ RGCs belong to alpha-like cells; however, a small proportion of SMI-32+ RGCs had small soma and small dendritic fields. Together, we present a full description of the morphology and distribution of SMI-32 immunoreactive RGCs in the rat retina. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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