Fourth Military Medical University

In this protocol, we described a new method to study the influence of glial cell heterogeneity on axon growth with an in vitro co-culture system. Rat cortical glial cells were cultured to confluence and cocultured with highly purified rat dorsal root ganglia neurons. Different glial cell influence on neurons adhesion and axon growth was compared directly in the same culture. This method provides a new way to directly study the glial cell heterogeneity influence on neuron adhesion and axon growth.

Single-fiber recording is an effective electrophysiological technique that is applicable to the central and peripheral nervous systems. Along with the preparation of intact DRG with the attached sciatic nerve, the mechanism of conduction failure is examined. Both protocols improve the understanding of the peripheral nervous system's relationship with pain.

Here we present a method to validate tail vein injections in rats by utilizing near-infrared fluorescence imaging data from dyes incorporated into agents or biological probes. The tail is imaged before and after the injection, the fluorescent signal is quantified, and an assessment of the injection quality is made.

We present a protocol to dissociate the intertwining factors of integrative difficulty and unexpectedness in semantically anomalous sentences by applying multiple repetitions to enhance participant's expectancy for anomalous sentences. The dissociation helps to investigate the major contributor of elicited event-related potentials (ERP) effects such as N400 in language studies.

We present a protocol to explore the relative activation sequence of phonology and semantics in visual word recognition. The results show that consistent with interactive accounts, semantic and phonological representations may be processed interactively, and higher-level linguistic representations may affect early processing.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s), implicated in type 2 inflammation, mainly participate in response to helminth infection, allergic diseases, metabolic homeostasis, and tissue repair. In this study, a procedure to isolate ILC2s from murine nasal mucosa and detect the expression of CD226 is demonstrated.

The present protocol describes the differential centrifugation for isolating and characterizing representative EVs (exosomes and microvesicles) from cultured human MSCs. Further applications of these EVs are also explained in this article.