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Cover picture: Diagrams of hippocampal granule cells superimposed on photomicrographs of the dentate gyrus from a control rat (top) and a kainate-treated epileptic rat (bottom). Both slices were treated with the Timm's stain to reveal mossy fiber boutons (brown) and cresyl violet (blue) to show the granule cell bodies. Note in the bottom panel that sprouted mossy fibers form a dense band of Timm's staining in the inner molecular layer. The schematic cells are shown with their somata superimposed on the granule cell layer, their dendrites extending into the molecular layer, and their axons into the hilar region. The yellow fibers illustrate the hypothesis that sprouted mossy fibers form recurrent excitatory connections between granule cells. Our study combining intracellular recording and glutamate microstimulation in the slice (see Wuarin and Dudek, pp. 4438-4448) presents data suggesting that the presence of excitatory synapses between granule cells can lead to increased seizure susceptibility when inhibition is depressed in slices from the kainate-treated epileptic rat. (We thank Dr. George J. Strecker and Mr. F. Dennis Giddings for preparing this figure.)
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