My brain visually stored this image as soon as I saw it because it was so striking to me. This is an image of a dissected, opened mouse retina that shows labeling of a specific subset of retinal ganglion cells (neurons within your eye that are responsible for the different qualities of vision). The transgenic labeling shows that these neurons have dendritic arborizations which point in a single direction (downward/ventral). Most likely due to this one-sidedness of their projections, this class of cells is responsible for recognizing only movement in the upward direction. The thin streaks that are also labeled (and where the arrow is pointing) are the axons of these cells, all converging near the center of your eye to form the optic nerve, which then sends visual information to be processed by your visual cortex.
Image taken from Sanes et al 2008 Nature
For those of you who don’t believe there is beauty in science. This is a dissociated hippocampal neuron with an antibody stain against MAP2, a common cell body and dendritic marker. Billions of these guys make up the human brain through trillions of synaptic connections. Neurons really are beautiful.
Image taken from our own lab.
