The purpose of this project is to examine the subcellular and extracellular structure of nerve and muscle and relate such structure to function. Determination of proteins contributing to these structures and structural modeling are methods used in this study. The following structures are probed: 1) Neuro-plasmic lattice, 2) neurofilaments, 3) microtubules, 4) axolemma, 5) glial cell membranes and 6) myofilaments. Methods developed and used in this study are: 1) Stereoscopic imaging, 2) optical autocorrelation, 3) fast Fourier transformation and 4) video image filtering and image enhancement using reverse Fourier transformation. Video imaged light microscopy is used to study living neurons in differential interference contrast.
