Estimation of cerebellar Purkinje cell number is an important evaluation parameter for the study of the development of the cerebellum as well as for investigating the changes occurring in various experimental and physiological conditions. The introduction of stereological techniques in biological and biomedical research has made quantification of Purkinje cells not only more reliable, because independent from morphology-related sources of bias, but also easier and less time consuming. In this paper, we will briefly overview the stereological techniques that have been used so far for estimation of Purkinje cell number in different animal species and we will describe a simple method (the confocal physical disector) for Purkinje cell quantification on confocal microscope optical slices, based on a variation of the physical disector technique that can be adopted without the need of any dedicated stereological workstation.

cerebellum, Purkinje cells, design-based stereology, disector, laser confocal microscopy, Cavalieri method