Spiny dendrite
the early days
I started this one during my first summer back home in Dartmouth, Canada after pandemic travel restrictions eased in 2022. I found some free wood online, cut it up, and started the reconstruction. I wasn’t able to finish it during my trip but I put it into my bag and brought it back to San Francisco, where I spent my hours in a nearby park sanding it down to a smooth finish. Being my first attempt, this piece is more of a representation than an accurate reconstruction, but the general form of dendritic spines comes through. It provided motivation to do better, more accurate reconstructions.
About the build
This is my first attempt to reconstruct a segment of dendrite from wood. The process involves first obtaining an image volume of serial section electron microscopy images - in this case a series was obtained from a freely available dataset from the lab of Dr. Kristen Harris. The next step involves slicing a single log of wood - in this case, a log of pine - into multiple sections such that each corresponds to an image section. I then trace the contour of the structure I want to reconstruct onto the cookie and cut out each shape, glue them all together and sand down the edges. I ended up staining the wood in a manner to represent the general location of the post-synaptic densities on the surface of the spine heads.
