The coordination of the voluntary muscles of the body primarily takes place in the cerebellum, a structure located behind the brain stem. The cerebellum communicates with the motor cortex and spinocerebellar cortex via numerous neural pathways, enabling it to transmit signals to the muscles and to receive information about their positioning. The cerebellum contains the majority of neurons in the human brain, but because most of the cells are small granule cells, the structure only comprises about 10 percent of the organ’s total volume. Like the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the name of which means “little brain,” is divided into two large hemispheres, as well as a number of smaller lobules.

Immunofluorescence was utilized to target myelin and astroglia in a sagittal section of rat brain tissue. First, the specimen was fixed, permeabilized, blocked with 10-percent normal goat serum, and treated with a cocktail of mouse anti-myelin CNPase and rabbit anti-GFAP primary antibodies. Next, to visualize the primary targets, the tissue section was treated with goat anti-mouse and anti-rabbit secondary antibodies (IgG) conjugated to Alexa Fluor 488 and Alexa Fluor 568, respectively. Finally, cell nuclei were labeled with Hoechst 33342. Images were recorded in grayscale with a 12-bit digital camera coupled to a Nikon Eclipse 80i microscope equipped with bandpass emission fluorescence filter optical blocks. During the processing stage, individual image channels were pseudocolored with RGB values corresponding to each of the fluorophore emission spectral profiles.