FIGURE 5.

Alaskan blueberry treatments alter the accumulation of aberrations in aging anterior touch receptor neurons. Animals from control and lifespan-extending blueberry treatments (60 and 200 μg/mL) were imaged for touch receptor neuron aberrations at days 5, 7, 9, and 11 of adulthood. A schematic of the locations of the six GFP-labeled touch receptor neurons (A) is shown. Neuron aging markers in order of broad to more specific effects are shown: Mean number of total aberrations (B), soma outgrowths (of all lengths) (C), extended outgrowths (≥2× longer than soma diameter) per anterior (ALM) neuron (D) are shown along with representative images of ALM somas free of aberrations (E) and with extended outgrowth (F). Percent of all anterior cells imaged with abnormal somas (G) is shown along with example ALM neurons with abnormal somas (H–K). Bars represent mean ± standard error of the mean. Asterisks (p < 0.05) and hashtags (p < 0.08) denote significance from age-matched control. Nworms = 28–62 and Nanterior cells = 48–101 per bar. White arrowheads denote location of specific aberration. All images were collected at 20× magnification and were cropped to the same scale (no other image processing was performed). White scale bars are 10 μm.