Abstract
Plant lectins bind to carbohydrates, which are found on the surface of different immune and endothelial cells including microglia. Using commercially available conjugates of lectins with different fluorophores allows one-step detection and visualization of microglia in vivo. Here, we describe a protocol enabling the use of a specific plant lectin isolated from Lycopersicon esculentum. Tomato lectin enables high-quality labeling of microglial cells in vivo and is applicable in any mouse strain at any age of the experimental animal without the need of genetic labeling, which is associated with time- and resource-consuming procedures.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by VolkswagenStiftung (grant no. 90233) to O.G.
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Brawek, B., Olmedillas del Moral, M., Garaschuk, O. (2019). In Vivo Visualization of Microglia Using Tomato Lectin. In: Garaschuk, O., Verkhratsky, A. (eds) Microglia. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2034. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9658-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9658-2_12
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