Fig. 1

Time-dependent response of glial cells to traumatic brain injury. (A) Western blot of the time course of expression changes in GFAP and CD68. (B, C) The bar graphs show relative intensities for GFAP and CD68. The results are shown as the mean ± SD. **p < 0.01 by one-way ANOVA. (D) Reactive astrocytes surround damaged regions while microglia populate the center of the damaged region at 3 dpi. (E) Quantitative analysis for distances of IBA1 + activated microglia, and GFAP + reactive astrocytes from the center of the lesion in (D) from 4 mice. *p < 0.05 by two-tailed Student’s t-test. (F) Western blot samples reflect the changes in expression of AXL and GAS6 after TBI. (G, H) Quantitative analyses of AXL and GAS6 bands. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01 by one-way ANOVA. (I) Immunofluorescence staining of GFAP, IBA1, NeuN (green), and AXL (red) in the ipsilateral cortex at 3 dpi; the nuclei were stained by DAPI (blue). (J) Immunofluorescence staining of GFAP (green), and AXL (red) at different time points post injury; the nuclei were stained by DAPI (blue). (K) Quantification analysis of the reactive astrocytes which expressed AXL kinase (GFAP+ & AXL+) after TBI in (J). n = 3 per group. **p < 0.05 by two-tail Student’s t-test