Fluorescence imaging of dendritic spines of Golgi-Cox-stained neurons using brightening background

We report a novel fluorescence imaging approach to imaging nonfluorescence-labeled biological tissue samples. The method was demonstrated by imaging neurons in Golgi-Cox-stained and epoxy-resin-embedded samples through the excitation of the background fluorescence of the specimens. The dark neurons stood out clearly against background fluorescence in the images, enabling the tracing of a single dendritic spine using both confocal and wide-field fluorescence microscopy. The results suggest that the reported fluorescence imaging method would provide an effective alternative solution to image nonfluorescence-labeled samples, and it allows tracing the dendritic spine structure of neurons.