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. 2019 Mar 27;9:5280. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-41747-4

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Characteristics of motor neurons in the cervical and lumbar spinal cord of G93A. Histological analysis of motor neurons in (A) cervical (C4-C6) and (B) lumbar (L3-L4) spinal cords (cresyl violet staining) showed healthy motor neurons in the ventral horns of control animals (a,d, asterisks). Most motor neurons had degenerated or vacuolated in the cervical (b) and lumbar (e) spinal cords of media mice at 17 weeks of age. Cell-treated ALS mice demonstrated substantial motor neuron survival in both cervical (c) and lumbar spinal (f) cord segments at the same age. A few degenerated motor neurons were noted in addition to vacuolated cells. * - healthy motor neuron, # - degenerated motor neuron, <- vacuolated motor neuron. Scale bar in a-f for full coronal spinal cord section is 200 µm and in ventral horn insert is 50 µm. (C) Stereological motor neuron counts in discrete levels of the cervical spinal cord showed significantly decreased motor neuron survival in media-injected mice vs. controls. ALS mice receiving cell transplants showed significantly greater motor neuron numbers in all analyzed spinal cord levels compared to media-injected mice. Of note, more surviving motor neurons were found at the enlarged C4-C6 cervical cord level in these animals. (D) In the lumbar spinal cord, significantly lower motor neuron numbers at all discrete cord levels were noted in media mice vs. controls, similar to results in the cervical spinal cord. Stereological counts of motor neurons in cell-treated mice showed significantly increased cell numbers in the ventral horns, mainly in the enlarged lumbar level at L3-L4, compared to media-injected animals. ^*p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01.