Figure 3. Effects of forced expression of M6a on retinal neurite extension. A,B: Neurite extension of virus-transduced enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-positive cells in retinal monolayer cultures. Retinal explants were infected with retorovirus particles that encode M6a and EGFP, and the cells were dissociated and subjected to monolayer culturing. After 11 days of culture, the cultures were harvested and stained with anti-GFP antibody. Neurite length was examined by measuring the EGFP-positive neurites on photographs taken under a fluorescence microscope. The length distribution percentages for the neurites are shown in A. The average lengths of neurites longer than 10 μm are shown in B. More than 100 cells were counted for each sample, and essentially the same results were obtained in three independent experiments. C,D: Neurite extension of virus-transduced EGFP-positive cells in retinal reaggregation cultures. Morphology of the M6a-EGFP virus-transfected retinal cells in reaggregation culture (C). The percentage of cells with neurite extensions of 30-100 μm or 100-200 μm in the M6a and control EGFP expressed retinal cells (D). Asterisk is p<0.05 by the Student's t-test.