Beautiful Brain Cells

Talking about all of the procedures and in depth stuff that I do in the lab I work in gets really boring for people who have absolutely no idea what anything I say means. So this time, I figured I would just show some of the stuff that I've done in the past.

These are a few pictures of various brain cells that I took on our half-million dollar microscope when I was just starting in lab:

This is an image of a young neuron that hasn't differentiated yet; that is, it hasn't distinctly formed an axon and dendrites. (Axon - information shipping Dendrite - information receiving) These cells were grown for one or two days, and then fixed (killed) with formaldehyde so we could stain them and see them under the microscope. The bright green regions are called growth cones: areas where both axons and dendrites extend.

This is an image of a bunch of neurons growing from somewhere on the right, with a few nice growth cone regions.

A really huge growth cone on a non-neuronal cell (I don't know what kind of cell it actually is). I just think this one looks like a brain cell with a mohawk.

Finally, another couple neurons with very large growth cone regions.