JOR Spine: A (first) year in review

We developed a lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration mouse model by resection of L3–L5 spinous processes along with supra- and inter-spinous ligaments and detachment of paraspinous...

In statistics, several tools are used to interpret the data. Measures of central tendency represent the characteristics of the data, such as mean, median, and mode. Additionally, measures of variance like standard deviation and range are used to find the spread of data from the mean. Relative standing measures the distance between data locations. Commonly used measures of relative standings are percentile, z score, and quartiles.
Percentiles are a type of fractile that partition data into...

Data are individual items of information obtained from a population or sample. Data may be classified as qualitative (categorical), quantitative continuous, or quantitative discrete. Because it is not practical to measure the entire population in a study, researchers use samples to represent the population. A random sample is a representative group from the population chosen by using a method that gives each individual in the population an equal chance of being included in the sample. Random...

Dendritic spines are important cellular features of the nervous system. Here live imaging methods are described for assessing the structure and function of dendritic spines in C. elegans. These approaches support the development of mutant screens for genes that define dendritic spine shape or...

In this video, we demonstrate the extraction of dorsal root ganglion or DRG from a harvested rat spine for downstream...

Source: Gouder, et. al. Three-dimensional Quantification of Dendritic Spines from Pyramidal Neurons Derived from Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. J. Vis. Exp. (2015).This video demonstrates the imaging and analysis of dendritic spines in transduced, immunolabeled pyramidal neurons using confocal microscopy. Background noise is reduced, and dendrites are traced by estimating their diameter and length. Automated spine segmentation involves setting parameters for dendrite and spine dimensions...