Adult neurogenesis occurs in a few selected regions of the mammalian brain. One such region is the hippocampus, the so-called gateway to memory, where adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN) occurs. Here, we provide a comprehensive description of the methods used in our laboratory to unambiguously detect a population of immature neurons in the human hippocampus until the 10th decade of life. The criteria used to refine and develop the current protocol include obtaining post-mortem human samples of remarkable quality and under tightly controlled conditions for immunohistochemistry (IHC) studies, optimizing tissue processing and histological procedures, establishing criteria to reliably validate antibody signal and performing unbiased stereological cell counts. Moreover, we provide a detailed description of the parameters that, in our view, should be reported in human AHN studies. The opposing results obtained by introducing slight variations in the methodological conditions should be considered by future studies that seek to increase our knowledge of this fascinating process. By applying simple and inexpensive tissue pre-treatments, this protocol, which can be completed in 7 days, might be applicable to a variety of IHC studies performed on other tissues of human (or animal) origin.

成年神经发生发生在哺乳动物大脑的几个选定区域。一个这样的区域是海马体，即所谓的记忆门户，发生成人海马神经发生 (AHN) 的地方。在这里，我们全面描述了我们实验室使用的方法，以明确检测人类海马体中未成熟的神经元群，直到生命的第 10 个十年。用于改进和开发当前协议的标准包括在严格控制的免疫组织化学 (IHC) 研究条件下获得卓越质量的死后人体样本、优化组织处理和组织学程序、建立可靠验证抗体信号的标准和执行无偏见的体视学细胞计数。此外，我们提供了参数的详细描述，在我们看来，应在人类 AHN 研究中报告。未来的研究应考虑通过引入方法条件的微小变化而获得的相反结果，以增加我们对这一迷人过程的了解。通过应用简单且廉价的组织预处理，该协议可在 7 天内完成，可能适用于对人类（或动物）来源的其他组织进行的各种 IHC 研究。