Distribution of Calretinin-Immunopositive Neurons in the Cat Lumbar Spinal Cord

Neurochemical atlas of the cat spinal cord

“…Moreover, individual peculiarities are also possible. Of note, some neurochemical patterns identified here have been previously verified ( Merkulyeva et al, 2016 , 2019 ; Veshchitskii et al, 2021 ), and we are sure that for the animal used in this study, the images were not influenced by the unique staining patterns. Owing to the difficulty in defining the intersegmental borders for the coccygeal region (very thin tightly located roots), only first two segments were processed for the atlas.…”

“…Calretinin antibody (Sigma-Aldrich, Cat.# AB5054, RRID: AB_2068506 ) is a rabbit polyclonal IgG recognizing 29 kDa band on Western blots of a cat brain ( Merkulyeva et al, 2022 ). In the cat spinal cord CR is present by many immunopositive neurons throughout the gray matter in the same structures as in previous our works with this antibody ( Veshchitskii et al, 2021 ) and works of other authors with other calretinin antibody ( Anelli and Heckman, 2005 ).…”

“…Spinal cord of the one intact adult domestic female cat (weighing 3.5 kg) was used for the creation of the images for the cat spinal cord atlas. Preliminary we verified all histological and immunohistochemical procedures with spinal cord, and all staining patterns using multiple animals ( Merkulyeva et al, 2016 , 2019 ; Shkorbatova et al, 2019 ; Veshchitskii et al, 2021 ). Immunohistochemical patterns are completely coincide with the present data.…”

“…The high resolution of images used allows to count and measure different neurons; this approach is useful for the morphological screening of the neuronal populations of the total spinal cord. Currently, only limited data exist about the neurochemical organization of the gray matter of the feline spinal cord, and attention has been mainly focused on particular segments or particular cell populations of the spinal cord ( Arvidsson et al, 1989 ; Traub et al, 1989 ; Carr et al, 1998 , 1999 ; Ritz et al, 2001 ; Christiansen et al, 2003 ; Anelli and Heckman, 2005 ; Merkulyeva et al, 2016 ; Veshchitskii et al, 2021 , 2022 ). We believe that this atlas will help to fill the gaps in the neuromorphological knowledge of the cat spinal cord.…”

“…It has been proposed that CR labels the population of excitatory interneurons located in the dorsal horns ( Smith et al, 2019 ; Peirs et al, 2021 ). At the same time, CR is detected in all spinal laminae without clear preference and labels subpopulation of the small interneurons of the Clarke’s nuclei (CN) ( Veshchitskii et al, 2021 ). CR also labels visceral neurons of the IML ( Edwards et al, 1996 ) and DGC ( Ren and Ruda, 1994 ; Merkulyeva et al, 2019 ).…”