Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 110, Issue 47, Pages 19113-19118Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1312691110
Keywords
soma counts; NeuN; GAD67; VPM; barrel cortex
Categories
Funding
- Anatomy Institute of the University of Tubingen
- Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience
- Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
- Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Grant BMBF/FKZ [01GQ1002]
- Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
- Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience
- Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology
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The cellular organization of the cortex is of fundamental importance for elucidating the structural principles that underlie its functions. It has been suggested that reconstructing the structure and synaptic wiring of the elementary functional building block of mammalian cortices, the cortical column, might suffice to reverse engineer and simulate the functions of entire cortices. In the vibrissal area of rodent somatosensory cortex, whisker-related barrel columns have been referred to as potential cytoarchitectonic equivalents of functional cortical columns. Here, we investigated the structural stereotypy of cortical barrel columns by measuring the 3D neuronal composition of the entire vibrissal area in rat somatosensory cortex and thalamus. We found that the number of neurons per cortical barrel column and thalamic barreloid varied substantially within individual animals, increasing by similar to 2.5-fold from dorsal to ventral whiskers. As a result, the ratio between whisker-specific thalamic and cortical neurons was remarkably constant. Thus, we hypothesize that the cellular architecture of sensory cortices reflects the degree of similarity in sensory input and not columnar and/or cortical uniformity principles.
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