ArticleCell and tissue research2015
How to count cells: the advantages and disadvantages of the isotropic fractionator compared with stereology.
Article in Cell and tissue research, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cellular Composition of the Brain of a Northern Minke Whale.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Region-specific brain decellularized extracellular matrix promotes cell recovery in an in vitro model of stroke.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Eighty-six billion and counting: do we know the number of neurons in the human brain?Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- The influence of age and sex on the absolute cell numbers of the human brain cerebral cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Adding the neuro to cognition: from food storing to nest building.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Alteration in the number of neuronal and non-neuronal cells in mouse models of obesity.Brain communications · 2023Article
- The spatiotemporal dynamics of microglia across the human lifespan.Developmental cell · 2022Article
- Differences in Evolution of Epileptic Seizures and Topographical Distribution of Tissue Damage in Selected Limbic Structures Between Male and Female Rats Submitted to the Pilocarpine Model.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Article
- Neuronal and non-neuronal scaling across brain regions within an intercross of domestic and wild chickens.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2022Article
- A novel automated morphological analysis of Iba1+ microglia using a deep learning assisted model.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2022Article
- A quantitative analysis of cerebellar anatomy in birds.Brain structure & function · 2021Article
- Dyrk1a Mutations Cause Undergrowth of Cortical Pyramidal Neurons via Dysregulated Growth Factor Signaling.Biological psychiatry · 2021Article
- Targeted Ablation of Primary Cilia in Differentiated Dopaminergic Neurons Reduces Striatal Dopamine and Responsiveness to Metabolic Stress.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The number of neurons in Drosophila and mosquito brains.PloS one · 2021Article
- Operations Research Methods for Estimating the Population Size of Neuron Types.Annals of operations research · 2020Article
- Whole-Brain Profiling of Cells and Circuits in Mammals by Tissue Clearing and Light-Sheet Microscopy.Neuron · 2020Review
- The evolution of brain structure captured in stereotyped cell count and cell type distributions.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
- Astrocytes as Guardians of Neuronal Excitability: Mechanisms Underlying Epileptogenesis.Frontiers in neurology · 2020Review
- White matter volume and white/gray matter ratio in mammalian species as a consequence of the universal scaling of cortical folding.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The number of cells comprising biological structures represents fundamental information in basic anatomy, development, aging, drug tests, pathology and genetic manipulations. Obtaining unbiased estimates of cell numbers, however, was until recently possible only through stereological techniques, which require specific training, equipment, histological processing and appropriate sampling strategies applied to structures with a homogeneous distribution of cell bodies. An alternative, the isotropic fractionator (IF), became available in 2005 as a fast and inexpensive method that requires little training, no specific software and only a few materials before it can be used to quantify total numbers of neuronal and non-neuronal cells in a whole organ such as the brain or any dissectible regions thereof. This method entails transforming a highly anisotropic tissue into a homogeneous suspension of free-floating nuclei that can then be counted under the microscope or by flow cytometry and identified morphologically and immunocytochemically as neuronal or non-neuronal. We compare the advantages and disadvantages of each method and provide researchers with guidelines for choosing the best method for their particular needs. IF is as accurate as unbiased stereology and faster than stereological techniques, as it requires no elaborate histological processing or sampling paradigms, providing reliable estimates in a few days rather than many weeks. Tissue shrinkage is also not an issue, since the estimates provided are independent of tissue volume. The main disadvantage of IF, however, is that it necessarily destroys the tissue analyzed and thus provides no spatial information on the cellular composition of biological regions of interest.
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