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Fig. 4 PTU suppresses thyroid hormone production but its specific inhibition on eye growth is not related to a general suppression of thyroid hormone synthesis.
(A) Whole-mount immunostaining against T4 was performed on PTU-treated and control larvae at 4 dpf. In controls, the T4+ thyroid follicles were stained as dark brown spots along the ventral pharyngeal midline. This staining was substantially diminished or absent in the PTU-treated larvae and in the control without the first antibody. Scale bar = 50 μm. (B) A boxplot of eye/body size ratios from an experiment of thyroid hormones supplements along with PTU treatment. Specifically, 10 larvae collected from the same parents were treated with nothing (control), PTU, PTU with 0.1 μM TriAc, 10 nM T3 or 30 nM T4. While the T3 supplement seemed to increase the eye/body size ratio of the PTU-treated larvae, statistical analysis on this and six additional independent experiments indicate that this was not a genuine increase. See text for details.