Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is an important mechanism in development and in diverse disease states. The morphological characteristics of apoptosis were first identified using the electron microscope. Since then, DNA laddering on agarose gels was found to correlate well with apoptotic cell death in cultured cells of dissimilar origins. Recently numerous DNA nick end labeling methods have been developed in an attempt to visualize, at the light microscopic level, the apoptotic cells responsible for DNA laddering.The present studies were designed to compare various tissue processing techniques and staining methods to assess the occurrence of apoptosis in post mortem tissue from Alzheimer's diseased (AD) and control human brains by DNA nick end labeling methods. Three tissue preparation methods and two commercial DNA nick end labeling kits were evaluated: the Apoptag kit from Oncor and the Biotin-21 dUTP 3' end labeling kit from Clontech. The detection methods of the two kits differed in that the Oncor kit used digoxigenin dUTP and anti-digoxigenin-peroxidase and the Clontech used biotinylated dUTP and avidinperoxidase. Both used 3-3' diaminobenzidine (DAB) for final color development.
