Fig. 7

Astrocyte GFAP redistributes throughout the optic nerve. a. Longitudinal section through 10-month DBA/2 J retina and optic nerve shows astrocytes labeled for GFAP (red). GFAP expression is highest at the optic nerve head (ONH), proximal optic nerve (1), and at the edges of the distal nerve (2). b. GFAP is significantly elevated in DBA/2 J nerves compared to D2 control nerves (p < 0.001). c. When analyzed in 0.25 mm segments, no one segment of DBA/2 J nerve contains significantly elevated GFAP compared to the same D2 control segment; however, the most proximal segment (0.25 mm) in both DBA/2 J and D2 control nerves contains significantly more GFAP than distal segments (#; p < 0.001). d. The CoM of GFAP within DBA/2 J nerves is significantly greater than D2 control nerves (p < 0.001). e. DBA/2 J nerves contain significantly altered GFAP CoM from D2 control nerves, and these differences occur most often within distal nerve segments (*; p < 0.029). f. GFAP parallelism is significantly greater in the distal compared to the proximal nerve in both the DBA/2 J (p = 0.015) and D2 control (p = 0.003). Additionally, GFAP within distal DBA/2 J nerves trends toward less parallelism than the equivalent segment of D2 control nerves (p = 0.09). g. DBA/2 J distal nerves tend to have a more edge-distributed center of mass when parallelism is greater (p = 0.005), indicating parallelism and center of mass are related. h. This relationship is trending toward the reverse in distal D2 control nerves (p = 0.07). Scale: 1 mm (A), 100 μm (A insets)