Example of immune staining

Last updated on Thursday, August 28 2008 by jdmiles

This is an example of a typical immune stain. The tissue we're looking at is brain, and the stain is an immune stain specific for beta amyloid. In this case, the background is kind of a homogenous gray. The only stuff we're interested in seeing here is brown - this is amyloid. In this slice of brain, we can see brown blobs in the neuropil, which represent senile plaques. We can also see amyloid that has collected in the wall of the blood vessel (the big thing in the middle), which occurs in amyloid angiopathy.
Note that we cannot tell just from the colors of this slide which immune stain we're using.

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Amyloid Angiopathy Labeled
A photomicrograph of a slice of brain tissue, which is stained with an immune stain that is specific for amyloid. The unnecessarily large red arrows in this image point to amyloid plaques and amyloid in a blood vessel.