Response to ‘The evolving mystery of why skeletal muscle is spared in seropositive neuromyelitis optica’

摘要

Dear Editor,We would like to thank you for the opportunity to respond to thequestions raised in Dr Verkman’s letter and to elucidate relatedaspects. We also thank Dr Verkman and colleagues for their attentionto our study.The use of g-STED super-resolution microscopy versus freezefractureelectron microscopy (FFEM) to analyse skeletal muscle andbrain AQP4 supramolecular assemblies (OAPs) used in our study [1]has been disputed by Verkman et al. While we agree that FFEM is thegold standard to visualise OAPs and also measure their size, we alsoare aware that the very small amount of the plasma membrane thatcan be suitable for analysis represents a major limit to obtaining statisticallysignificant data (such as the OAP dimension) representativeof the entire tissue. In contrast, STED microscopy has the enormousadvantage of analysing, in real time, very large portions of the plasmamembrane, with a resolution that in our setup can reach approximately30 nm, providing the possibility to have a more completevision of the entire tissue and handle a large amount of data.