Quantifying the morphologial changes induced on neurons by chemical stimulation.

Abstract

This report focuses on different morphometric tools providing estimates of shape changes in cell cultures stimulated by environmental factors. To test our methods we used the fluorescence microscopy observations on cultures of rat hippocampal neurons treated with Cytotoxic Necrotizing Factor 1 (CNF1). The ’global’ data concerning all the cells in a microscopic image, reported in a recent work on the toxin-induced changes in the cell soma, as well as in the dendrites number, length and diameter, were: i) fully confirmed by our estimates, and ii) reinforced by morphometric analyses carried out on single cells. Such results underline the importance of high-resolution studies of cell morphometry to dissect-out the structure-function relationships, and justify the efforts: i) to investigate the time-dependent changes in shape, and ii) to exploit the euristic power of modeling and simulating the functional modifications associated to given morphological changes.