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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access first published online on May 15, 2009
This version published online on July 20, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp093
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© 2009 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.

Neurotrophin-3 Is Involved in the Formation of Apical Dendritic Bundles in Cortical Layer 2 of the Rat

Toshio Miyashita1,3, Marie Wintzer1, Tohru Kurotani1, Tomokazu Konishi2, Noritaka Ichinohe1 and Kathleen S. Rockland1

1 Laboratory for Cortical Organization and Systematics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan, 2 Faculty of Bioresource Sciences, Akita Prefectural University, Shimo-Shinjyo, Akita 010-0195, Japan

Address correspondence to Toshio Miyashita, PhD, Laboratory for Cortical Organization and Systematics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan. Email: tmiyashita{at}berkeley.edu.

Apical dendritic bundles from pyramidal neurons are a prominent feature of cortical neuropil but with significant area specializations. Here, we investigate mechanisms of bundle formation, focusing on layer (L) 2 bundles in rat granular retrosplenial cortex (GRS), a limbic area implicated in spatial memory. By using microarrays, we first searched for genes highly and specifically expressed in GRS L2 at postnatal day (P) 3 versus GRS L2 at P12 (respectively, before and after bundle formation), versus GRS L5 (at P3), and versus L2 in barrel field cortex (BF) (at P3). Several genes, including neurotrophin-3 (NT-3), were identified as transiently and specifically expressed in GRS L2. Three of these were cloned and confirmed by in situ hybridization. To test that NT-3–mediated events are causally involved in bundle formation, we used in utero electroporation to overexpress NT-3 in other cortical areas. This produced prominent bundles of dendrites originating from L2 neurons in BF, where L2 bundles are normally absent. Intracellular biocytin fills, after physiological recording in vitro, revealed increased dendritic branching in L1 of BF. The controlled ectopic induction of dendritic bundles identifies a new role for NT-3 and a new in vivo model for investigating dendritic bundles and their formation.

Key Words: dendrite • electroporation • GeneChip • minicolumns • pyramidal neuron

3 Current address: Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA


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