Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) consist of Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) affecting about 0.1% of the western population. These two chronic gut diseases affect youth at their prime of life causing diarrhoea, intestinal bleeding, and severe gut discomfort. Mouse models ...
The serine protease granzyme B (GrB) is a key effector molecule in cell-mediated immunity, released by cytotoxic lymphocytes (CLs) to induce cell death in neoplastic or virus-infected cells. The ability to detect and measure GrB activity is important for understanding CLs. Unfortunate ...
Investigation of Granzyme B (GrB) function and pathophysiology in both human settings and rodent models increasingly involve the use of indirect immunofluorescence imaging and fluorescence-activated cell sorting, which requires reliable GrB antibodies that do not recogni ...
Accurate measurement of cytokine concentrations is a powerful and essential approach to the study of inflammation. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is a simple, low-cost analytical tool that provides both the specificity and sensitivity required for the study of cyto ...
Cell death is of utmost importance in immunity, in part as a way to control the development and activity of leukocytes, but also as a strategy employed by leukocytes to rid the body of unwanted cells. Apoptosis is the classic type of programmed cell death involving an ordered sequence of cellular events, ...
Identification of the precise location, where hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) reside in the bone marrow, has made a great leap forward with the advance of live time-lapse video 2-photon fluorescent microscopy. These studies have shown that HSCs preferentially resides in the endosteal re ...
The hematopoietic system is highly proliferative in the bone marrow (BM) due to the short half-life of granulocytes and platelets in the blood. Analysis of cell cycling and cell proliferation in vivo in specific populations of the mouse BM has highlighted some key properties of adult hematopo ...
Lipid bodies, also known as lipid droplets, are present in most eukaryotic cells. In leukocytes, lipid bodies are functionally active organelles with central roles in inflammation and are considered structural markers of inflammatory cells in a range of diseases. The identification of ...
Glycol methacrylate (GMA), a water and ethanol miscible plastic resin, is a medium handy to use for light microscopy embedding that has a number of advantages than paraffin embedding. The GMA improves the histological, morphometrical, and immunohistochemical evaluations, mainly due ...
It is possible to obtain histological preparation of teeth and periodontium with satisfactory levels of quality by means of routine histological techniques, since specific cares are implemented during the sample processing. The formation of access ducts for the quick penetration of ...
Image cytometry (ICM) associates microscopy, digital image and software technologies, and has been particularly useful in spatial and densitometric cytological analyses, such as DNA ploidy and DNA content measurements. Basically, ICM integrates methodologies of optical mic ...
It is often necessary to process large plant samples for light microscopy studies, but due to structural characteristics of plant tissues, especially intercellular spaces, large vacuoles, and phenolic substances, results are often unsatisfactory. When large samples are embedded ...
During acute infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, the causal agent of Chagas’ disease, tissue damage is related to intense tissue parasitism. Here we discuss histological approaches for an optimal visualization and quantification of T. cruzi nests in the heart, the main target o ...
The intravital microscopy is a valuable tool to capture images of cells in living organisms and to make studies of molecular determinants of leukocyte trafficking easier. Using this technique, we can directly visualize and measure each step of the leukocyte recruitment paradigm, inclu ...
Eicosanoids (prostaglandins, leukotrienes and lipoxins) are a family of signaling lipids derived from arachidonic acid that have important roles in physiological and pathological processes. Over the past years, it has been established that successful eicosanoid production is ...
A transgenic mouse, in which the regulatory elements of the stem cell marker, nestin drive green fluorescent protein (ND-GFP), expresses GFP in nascent blood vessels. Red fluorescent protein (RFP)-expressing tumors transplanted to nestin-GFP mice enable specific visualization of ...
Calcium ions play fundamental roles in many cellular processes in virtually all type of cells. The use of Ca2+ sensitive fluorescent indicators has proven to be an indispensable tool for studying the spatio-temporal dynamics of intracellular calcium (i). With the aid of laser scanning conf ...
Planktonic organisms dominate waters in ponds, lakes and oceans. Because of their short life cycles, plankters respond quickly to environmental changes and the variability in their density and composition are more likely to indicate the quality of the water mass in which they are found. Plan ...
We have developed a technique, using a combination of immunofluorescent staining of semi-ultrathin sections of epoxy resin-embedded samples and the corresponding differential interference contrast (DIC) images obtained by light microscopy that provides detailed inform ...
The styryl dye FM1-43 is a powerful tool to track exocytosis, endocytosis and recycling of secretory granules or vesicles. Due to its unique structure, dye molecules reversibly partition into the outer leaflet of surface membrane without permeating due to two cationic charges located in th ...