Fig. 5

Shorter microvilli and microvillus inclusions, the main attributes of MVID, are present in enterocytes of gsp/myoVb mutants.

Electron micrographs of thin sections, passing through the enterocytes of 6dpf wild type (A, C) and gsp/myoVb mutant larvae (B, D–G). Note the absence of microvilli (B), the reduction in microvillus length (D) and presence of microvillus inclusions (B, E–G) in gsp/myoVb enterocytes as compared to wild type enterocytes (A). The image shown in G is a high magnification image of the inclusion seen in Fig. 7I. The bar graph (H) shows the difference in the microvillar length in the midgut of wild type siblings and gsp mutants. For the EM analysis, we used 4 siblings and 5 mutant animals. The length measurements were done on 137 microvilli from 49 enterocytes of 4 siblings and on 95 microvilli from 33 enterocytes of 3 mutants. The white arrowheads indicate microvillus inclusions whereas the black arrows (in A-C) point to microvilli. A black arrowhead in (B) points to the loss of microvilli whereas a black arrow in (G) points to terminal web surrounding the microvillus inclusion. The square bracket shows the comparison and asterisk indicates that the difference is statistically significant by an unpaired t-test with unequal variance at p < 0.0001. The error bars in H represent the SD. Scale bars correspond to 1 μm.