Excitatory neurons of the cortex: similarities and variations


This seminar will be held on Microsoft Teams. Please join with your video off and mikes muted. Email hod-pa@dpag.ox.ac.uk for more details.

Structurally, the mammalian neocortex is overly complex, a cubic millimetre of cortical tissue contains several hundreds of meters of dendrite and axon path lengths. Vibrissal somatosensory cortex (vS1; i.e barrel cortex) and vibrissal motor cortex (vM1) are the two key structures involved in somatosensation in rodents. To understand the true themes and variations of these two cortical areas, we investigated morphological and electrophysiological properties of individual neurons of vS1 and vM1 using cell-attached recording and biocytin labelling in vivo in p28-p40 days old Wistar albino rats. Our data revealed that both vM1 and vS1 are composed of similar canonical cell types. Field span of dendrites is area specific, not cell type-specific. The morphological features of axons were specific to the cortical area that they are located in.