Figure 2
FGF1 expression is elevated in remyelinated lesions. a FGF1 gene expression was analyzed by quantitative PCR TLDA relative to GAPDH in individual lesion areas (Re: remyelinated, De: demyelinated inactive, Active: actively demyelinating areas) and control white matter specimens (Ctrl.). Each symbol represents a single dissected area. Medians (bars) and 1st/3rd quartiles (boxes) are shown. Whiskers extend to the range up to 1.5 times of the interquartile range; values beyond were regarded as outliers. We noted one outlier in the six analyzed demyelinated inactive lesions, but we cannot explain why this one lesion had a higher FGF1 level than all others. Regarding the primary topic of remyelination in this study, we compared the remyelinated lesions with the other groups of tissue specimens; Mann–Whitney U test showed a significant difference between the remyelinated areas and controls (p < 0.01), while the differences between remyelinated vs. demyelinated inactive areas (p = 0.1) and remyelinated vs. actively demyelinating areas (p = 0.2) did not reach statistical significance. b-d In two blocks, adjacent de- and remyelinated areas were present within the same lesion and excised for quantitative PCR TLDA analysis (labelled as Block 1 and 2 for Figure 2a-e). FGF1 expression normalized to GAPDH is shown. Fold-changes of FGF1 expression between the re- and demyelinated areas in each block were calculated for the different housekeeping genes. The geometric mean of these fold changes obtained by normalization to the three housekeeping genes was 2.1× for block 1 and 4.1× for block 2.