Figure 1.

Aberrant mossy fiber sprouting increases with age in NS-Pten knockouts. Wild type and knockout animals were sacrificed and their brains processed for Timm staining to detect mossy fiber terminals. Sections were scored by three independent investigators on a scale of 0–5, where zero indicates no abnormal staining outside of the hilus, and 5 indicates severely abnormal staining that penetrates through the granule cell layer and into the inner molecular layer. A) Timm stained coronal sections at the level of the dentate gyrus reveal aberrant mossy fiber sprouting in NS-Pten conditional knockout animals compared to wild type mice at four weeks of age (scale bar = 50µm). B) Summary data reveal significantly increased Timm scores in the knockout compared to the wild type mice at four weeks of age (n=4–5). C) Timm scores significantly increased with age in NS-Pten knockout mice (n=5–9), indicating a progressive increase in aberrant mossy fiber sprouting. *p<0.05, **p<0.01.