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. 2016 Oct 15;129(20):3705–3720. doi: 10.1242/jcs.192203

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

Complete amelioration of adverse remodeling in Des−/− hearts overexpressing αΒ-crystallin. (A) Histological Masson's trichrome staining of heart sections from 3.5-month-old wild-type (wt; n=7), Des−/− (n=7), Des−/−αBCry4 (n=10) and Des−/−αBCry6 (n=7) mice. Fibrosis was detected by blue staining of collagen deposition. (B) Hematoxylin and eosin staining of 23-day-old wild-type (n=6), Des−/− (n=12), Des−/−αΒCry (n=15) and wtαΒCry (n=6) mice, showing the inflammatory infiltration in the Des−/− myocardium compared to that in the other genotypes. Scale bars: 20 µm. (C) Semi-quantitative determination of myocardial fibrosis using ImageJ software analysis. **P<0.01 vs wild-type and Des−/−αBCry6; ***P<0.0001 vs Des−/−; #P<0.001 vs wild type and Des−/−αBCry4. (D) Assessment of cardiac inflammation using 23-day-old hearts and a conventional grading system (see Psarras et al., 2012). ***P<0.0001 vs wild type, Des−/−αΒCry and wtαΒCry. (E) Evaluation of cardiomyocyte membrane permeability by Evan's-Blue (red) and α-actinin (green) staining of frozen heart sections from 23-day-old mice; blue staining of nuclei, DAPI. Scale bars: 100 µm. (F) A quantification of the EBD-positive area by using ImageJ software analysis. ***P<0.0001. In the box-and-whisker plots in D and F, the boxes indicate the interquartile range of the samples, the lines represent the median values and the whiskers represent the outliers. All error bars show mean±s.e.m. (unpaired Student's t-test).