Cellular neuroscienceDensity and morphology of dendritic spines in mouse neocortex
Section snippets
Preparation of material and cell injections
C57BL/6 mice (n=2 males, 2 months old) were anesthetized by administering a lethal i.p. injection of sodium pentobarbitone and they were then perfused intracardially with 4% paraformaldehyde in 0.1M phosphate buffer. All experiments were performed in accordance with the guidelines established by the European Union regarding the use and care of laboratory animals. The brains were removed from each animal and the cortex of the right hemisphere was flattened between two glass slides before
Density and total number of spines on the basal dendrites
We first compared the structure of dendritic trees between different cortical areas. Plotting the results of the Sholl 2-D analysis and the 3-D analysis revealed that on average, pyramidal cell dendrites in M2 had more branches than those in S2. Furthermore, on average those in S2 had more branches than those in V2L/TeA (Fig. 3A). Similarly, the peak branching complexity in the basal dendritic trees of pyramidal cells in M2 was higher than that in S2 and V2L/TeA. An analysis of variance of the
Discussion
This study has generated two major findings. Firstly, we found no significant differences in spine density at the corresponding distances along the basal dendrites of layer III pyramidal cells between the M2, S2 and V2L/TeA regions of mice. In contrast, we did observe appreciable differences in our estimates of the total number of spines in the basal dendritic trees of pyramidal neurons between these three regions. Secondly, we found significant differences in the head size and neck length of
Acknowledgments
We thank the members of our laboratories for their assistance, especially to J. Arellano for the discussions regarding statistics. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (BFI2003-02745), the Comunidad de Madrid (grant 08.5/0027/2001), the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (G.N.E.) and the National Eye Institute and the Human Frontiers Science Project (R.Y.). I.B.-Y. is research fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science
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