Fig. 3: IHC studies on rats with implanted SCEAs.

a Schematics showing the IHC assessment. The SCEAs were implanted epidurally through minimally invasive surgery in the right hemisphere of the rat brains. Contralateral sides with no implants served as controls. The blue and green blocks illustrate the ROIs in the quantitative analyses. In the quantitative analyses, the cortex was divided into three parts: L1, the UL, and the LL. b Example immunofluorescence images of a rat cortex under the SCEA (implanted) and on the contralateral control side (control) at different time points after SCEAs implantation. Scale bar, 500 μm. c Normalized cell density of NeuN-labelled neurons in the upper layers. d, e Normalized signal of GFAP-labelled astrocytes in layer I (d) and the upper layers (e). f–h Normalized cell density of Iba1-labelled microglial cells in layer I (f) the upper layers (g) and the lower layers (h). The cell density (for the neurons and microglia) and signal (for the astrocytes) on the implanted sides were normalized to those on the control side (average values from all animal samples at each time point). Individual data points are overlaid on the box plots. The box plots show the median and quartile range, and the whiskers denote 1.5× the interquartile range. n = 16 from 4 rats for weeks 1 and 2 data, n = 29 from 4 rats for week 4 data, n = 23 from 6 rats for week 8 data. For the data that could be represented by a normal distribution, two-sided paired t tests were used. Otherwise, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used in the significance analysis. ns, p > 0.05, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. p = 0.0029 (week 1, d), p = 0.0000 (week 1, f), p = 0.0052 (week 1, g), p = 0.0496 (week 1, h). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.