Molded Rodent Brian Cavities in Stereotaxic Alignment

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Diseases of the brain are typically long term and disabling, and their care is expensive. A report compiled in 2000 shows 1.1 million new cases annually of the 10 most common brain diseases. More than 16 million persons receive ongoing care for these diseases (www.caregiver.org). The Society for Neuroscience, with 36,000 member scientists, seeks to advance knowledge of the healthy and diseased brain through basic research, toward elucidating new means of prevention or treatment of brain disease. The business objective of MyNeuroLab.com is to support neuroscience researchers through innovation in their specialized tools. Sectioning brain for histology following an animal neuroscience research project has traditionally been a sequential process, one brain sectioned at a time, and one slice taken and mounted at a time. In contrast, staining is a parallel process, all sections done at once, which ensures identical treatment, increases speed, and facilitates analysis. We propose a parallel processing approach to mounting and sectioning rodent brains, either as fresh or perfused tissue. We will develop molds, to be offered commercially, in which to cast OCT or gelatin into a block with a cavity to accommodate the species of brain under study. With our technology, the molds can accommodate either fresh or perfused brains. Different molds will be needed for each species to be studied, initially adult rat and adult mouse brains. These molds can be used in either of two ways. 1) The molded blocks can be used with one brain at a time, but will ensure consistent stereotaxic orientation and alignment. 2) The molded blocks can be grouped together, as many as desired, and the resulting large block of brains, which will be embedded all in the same stereotaxic plane and at the same depth, will be sectioned with a large format cryostat sectioning up to 25 mouse brains in each pass. The "pages" of sections taken with each pass of the blade will be mounted on large format (2" x 3" slides). The research proposed herein is to construct the starting molds, assemble such a sectionable block of embedded brains, section it, and determine the degree of validity of orientation and offset by assessing the degree of deviation from lateral symmetry of each coronal section, and the degree of variation in microns of the plane of section of each brain slice.