Consuming brain or other nerve tissue is associated with certain health risks, but has been practiced in various human cultures, especially as part of mourning rituals. The accidental consumption of nerve tissue may also occur if the material is unknowingly introduced into ground meats. Prion diseases are spread when infected nervous tissue is consumed. These diseases include kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle, scrapie in sheep, and the chronic wasting disease that occurs in elk and deer. Such diseases, in which abnormally configured proteins accumulate, result in the gradual decomposition of brain tissue and are fatal.

Immunofluorescence was utilized to label neurofilaments and astrocytes in a thin 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-NF-P (phosphorylated neurofilaments) and rabbit anti-GFAP (glial fibrillary acidic protein) primary antibodies. Then, 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, Hoechst 33342 was employed to counterstain cell nuclei. 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.