Fig. 10.

Quantitation of hypoglossal motor neuron death in LCN-SOD1 mice at advanced disease stage. Images (a–d) are representative NeuN-stained sections of the hypoglossal motor nucleus in the brainstem of advanced disease stage LCN-SOD1 mice (n = 6) and age-matched colony controls (n = 4). In a and b, the yellow outlines indicate the regions within which motor neurons were counted, and the white boxes highlight the areas shown at higher magnification in (c) and (d). White arrows denote viable/healthy neurons, whereas dead/dying neurons are indicated by yellow arrows. Long arrows point to the neurons shown at higher magnification in (e) and (f). Images (a, b) and (e, f) were captured with an epifluorescence microscope (Leica DM4000) using either the 10 × or 100 × objective. For improved visualization of the regions of interest depicted here, stacked images (c, d) were taken through the 20 × objective of a Leica confocal microscope using LAS-AF software. g Adjacent boxplots and dotplots show the significant reduction of hypoglossal neurons for LCN-SOD1 versus control mice (*p = 0.01)