Monday, October 11, 2010

Visualizing nociceptors

I recently realized that I've been depicting nociceptors completely inaccurately up until now... For one, sensory afferent neurons should be pseudounipolar in structure (I have been drawing a cross between a bipolar and multipolar neuron...).

More questions seemed to pop up upon my realization...
  1. Am I dealing with C-fibers, A-δ fibers, or both?C-fibers are small and unmyelinated whereas A-δ fibers are larger and myelinated. This is something I need to clarify soon, since the nociceptor is a key character in my film!
  2. Is the myelination along the entire length of the axon? Or does it end before the terminal branching?
  3. What do the terminal branches look like anyway?!
I will try to find the answers to these questions soon...

I'm surprised there aren't many good images (SEM, etc.) of nociceptors. I found a couple of histology slides of C-fibers but they weren't very informative...

No comments:

Post a Comment