Differential Neurovascular Plexus Innervation in the Spleen

The spleen functions as the main lymph organ in the body. The spleen is responsible for filtering and storing blood, making white blood cells, and fighting infections. The spleen has not been researched heavily and only recently found four splenic nerve branches (SN) present different electrophysiological activity in a study done on rats (Gonzalez-Gonzalez et al., 2021). The hypothesis that the four SNs have different patterns of innervations was based in this previous research. Viral tract tracers tagged with soluble GFP and mCherry were respectively injected into SN1 and SN3 and put through double enzymatic chromogenic staining to visualize the signals received. Results showed that differences between innervations on SN1 and SN3 can explain the results gathered from the previous study.