Figure 3. Five stages of palatal fusion in vitro as observed from confocal analysis of whole-mount palates stained with CCFSE (A–E), H&E staining (F-J), and laminin immunohistochemical studies (K-O) (Kang and Svoboda, 2002). Characteristics of each stage in the 3 morphological formats are explained in Table 1. Scale bars = 200 µM in A-E and 160 µM in F-O. (P) Mean fusion scores of palates after 72 hrs of culture in controls and LY294002 treatment groups. There was no significant difference between controls and 100 M LY294002-treated tissues. However, the 1- and 10-µM LY294002-treated palates were significantly different from controls (p 0.01).