Following fixation, brains were paraffin-embedded and serially sectioned at 4 µm. Three sets of four serial coronal sections every 100 µm were taken at each of the following two levels, as previously described [6 (link)]: level 1 started at the medial septal nucleus and level 2 at the hippocampal formation.
Six slides per brain (three slides per level) were stained with Cresyl Violet (CV; C5042-10G; Sigma- Aldrich, Overijse, Belgium), and two slides per brain (one slide per level) were incubated with each of the following primary antibodies: mouse monoclonal anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein antibody (GFAP) (G6171, Sigma-Aldrich, St Louis, MO, USA), anti-NG2 chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan antibody (MAB5384, Millipore, Billerica, MA, USA), or a terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) method for fluorescent in situ end labeling of double-stranded DNA fragmentation (Apoptag S7110; Millipore). The secondary antibody was Alexa Fluor® 488 goat anti-mouse conjugate (Invitrogen, Sigma-Aldrich, Bornem, Belgium) or Alexa Fluor® 647 goat anti-mouse conjugate. Sections were counterstained with Hoechst 33342 (Sigma-Aldrich, Bornem, Belgium). The following brain areas were assessed: frontal cortex (FC), corpus callosum (CC), caudate nucleus (CN), internal capsule (IC), putamen (P), and hippocampus (HC).
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