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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Nov 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Comp Neurol. 2010 Nov 1;518(21):4463–4478. doi: 10.1002/cne.22467

Figure 7.

Figure 7

Analysis of dendritic spines in postnatal day 40 wild type (WT) versus Emx1cre/Metfx/fx (−/−) dorsolateral medium spiny neurons (MSNs). Confocal projection images of 2 WT (A and C) and 2 −/− (B and D) MSN dendritic segments (top row) and associated three-dimensional (3D) segmented renderings shown in overlay (middle row, E,G and F,H) and apart (bottom row, I,K and J,L). The images depict portions of analyzed full-length segments with spine density and spine head volume values similar to the mean values of their genotypic group. M–O: Quantification of spine density and spine head volume based on 3D renderings. No difference in spine density was observed between genotypic groups (M), but an ~12% increase in average spine head volume was found for −/−MSN dendritic segments as compared with WT (N). The frequency distribution of spine head volumes reveals a trend in −/− MSN dendrites toward decreased numbers of the thinnest spine types and significant increases in select classes of larger spines (O). Scale bar = 4 μM for all images. *p ≤ 0.05, #p ≤ 0.1.