ABSTRACT
Ultrastructural studies of the adult human brain are scarce due to the difficulty in obtaining brains with short postmortem intervals (Aganova & Uranova, 1992; Roberts & Francis, 1993; Roberts et al., 1994, 1996a,b, 1997; Kung et al., 1996, 1998; Uranova, 1996). Most reports are performed in hippocampal or cortical tissue obtained during surgical resection (Babb et al., 1991; Ong & Garey, 1993; Smiley et al., 1994). Surgical samples have the advantage of no postmortem interval, but may be abnormal since they are removed adjacent to aberrant tissue, particularly epileptic foci. It is in fact possible to perform ultrastructural studies using postmortem tissue, which offers the advantage of normal control tissue, access to any part of the brain, and comparisons to diseased material. Sources of tissue for the study of human development include spontaneous or medically induced abortions and stillborn premature infants. The following chapter details methods which have been successful in our laboratory for analysis of adult and fetal human brain.
