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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 May 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biol Psychiatry. 2009 Dec 16;67(9):872–879. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.09.036

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Dendritic morphology in the NAc of sexually experienced and naïve animals. Sexual experience caused an increase in numbers of dendrites and dendritic spines, illustrated by images (A,B) and camera lucida drawings (C,D) of representative NAc shell neurons as well as spine density on second order dendrites (E,F) in NAc shell of naïve (A,C,E) or experienced (B,D,F) animals, 7 days following last treatment. Scale bar indicates 50 (A,B) or 10 (E,F) μm. Quantitative analysis shows significant increases of numbers of dendrites per centrifugal order (G–J) and numbers of spines (K,L) in NAc core (G,H) and shell (I,J) in sexually experienced males (black bars) compared to naïve males (white bars), but only 7 days following last mating (H,J,I). * indicates a statistically significant difference from naïve males (p-values: G: 0: 0.013 1: < 0.001; 2: <0.001; 3: <0.0001; 4: < 0.001; 5: < 0.001; I: 0: 0.002; 1: < 0.0001; 2: < 0.001; 3: < 0.001; 4: < 0.001; 5: < 0.001; L: core: 0.001; shell: < 0.001).