Manta-Sphere

"One of the focuses of our lab is adult neurogenesis in which new neurons are born from a pool of stem cells and integrate into their environment as mature, active cells. There are two main regions in the adult brain where adult neurogenesis occurs, the subventricular zone (SVZ) and the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus. These stem cells have been associated with learning and memory, brain plasticity and replacement of dying neurons. This image represents a small part of my research in which I have isolated neural stem cells from the SVZ of adult mice and cultured them in vitro. These cells grow in a sphere-like formation in vitro which is not duplicated in vivo. They have been plated onto a matrix and differentiated for 16 hours. The cells have then been stained for astrocytes in green using glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), mature neurons in red using beta-III tubulin, and all nuclei in blue using DAPI."