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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on November 12, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(7):1588-1603; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm189
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Critical Period Plasticity of Axonal Arbors of Layer 2/3 Pyramidal Neurons in Rat Somatosensory Cortex: Layer-Specific Reduction of Projections into Deprived Cortical Columns

P. Broser1, V. Grinevich2,3, P. Osten2,3, B. Sakmann1 and D. J. Wallace1

1 Department of Cell Physiology, 2 Department of Molecular Neurobiology, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstrasse 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany, 3 Department of Physiology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 303 E Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60611, USA

Address correspondence to Damian Wallace, PhD Department of Cell Physiology, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstrasse 29, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany. Email: dhw{at}mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de.

We examined the effect of whisker trimming during early postnatal development on the morphology of axonal arbors in rat somatosensory cortex. Axonal arbors from populations of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in the D2 column were labeled by lentivirus-mediated expression of green fluorescent protein. Axonal projection patterns were compared between untrimmed control animals and animals with all whiskers in A-, B-, and C-rows trimmed (D- and E-rows left intact) from postnatal days 7 to 15 (termed from here on DE-pairing). Control animals had approximately symmetrical horizontal projections toward C- and E-row columns in both supra- and infragranular layers. Following DE-pairing, the density of axons in supragranular layers projecting from the labeled neurons in the D2 column was higher in E- than in C-row columns. This asymmetry resulted primarily from a reduction in projection density toward the deprived C-row columns. In contrast, no change was observed in infragranular layers. The results indicate that DE-pairing during early postnatal development results in reduced axonal projection from nondeprived into deprived columns and that cortical neurons are capable of structural rearrangements at subsets of their axonal arbors.

Key Words: axon anatomy • barrel cortex • extended focus imaging bright field microscopy • lentivirus • whisker


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