For analysis of dendritic development, 3D reconstruction of entire dendritic processes of each GFP+ neuron was made from Z-series stacks of confocal images. The 2D projection images were traced with NIH ImageJ. All GFP+ dentate granule cells with largely intact dendritic trees were analyzed for total dendritic length as described (Duan et al., 2007; Ge et al., 2006). The measurements did not include corrections for inclinations of dendritic process and therefore represented projected lengths. Sholl analysis for dendritic complexity was carried out by counting the number of dendrites that crossed a series of concentric circles at 10 μm intervals from the cell soma as previously described (Duan et al., 2007). All quantifications were carried out in a blind fashion to experimental conditions. Statistic significance was determined with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and student t-test.
