Intra- and inter-areal connections between the primary visual cortex V1 and the area immediately surrounding V1 in the rat
Section snippets
Animals and injection procedures
Out of a larger sample, a total of 17 rats (female Long–Evans Hooded, weight 150 g) were included in this study, in two series of experiments. Anaesthesia was induced with 3% Halothane in a small anaesthetic chamber, and maintained with intraperitoneal injection of a 2.7 mg/kg solution of fentanyl citrate and fluanisone (Hypnorm: 0.315 mg/ml fentanyl citrate, 10 mg/ml fluanisone; Janssen-Cilag) and midazolam (Hypnovel: 5 mg/ml; Roche). Single small injections of anatomical tracer were made in area
General observations
As observed previously,67 V1 can be distinguished from its surrounding rim region by its denser myelin staining. In our myelin-stained material, V1 was estimated to have a 7–8 mm2 area (our estimate of shrinkage compared to the in vivo state is slightly more than 10% along one axis); the total area of the V1 recipient rim territory was about 7 mm2. These values correspond to published figures14 of 7 mm2 for V1 and 6 mm2 for the V1 recipient rim region. In the rim region, we found the medial area (
Technical considerations
In the course of these anatomical experiments, it was clear that the three anatomical tracers used each transported with different emphasis on retro- and orthograde directions. The orthograde labelling with BDA and biocytin was very comparable, producing in all cases clear distinction between a local zone of fibre and terminal staining immediately surrounding the injection site, and patches of terminal label offset from this local label and separated from it by terminal sparse regions. The
Conclusion
This study has emphasized commonalties that could exist between the rat and other animals in terms of scaling and patterning of intra-areal, feedforward and feedback pathways. We suggest that the difficulty in obtaining agreement between investigators exploring rat visual cortex retinotopic maps and in definition of boundaries in the rim region using physiological recording techniques could be due to patchy systems of feedforward, feedback and intra-areal connections. Such connectivity may
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Drs A. Angelucci and R. Lund for comments on the manuscript, and S. Griffiths for photographic help and K. Sainsbury for expert technical assistance. The work was supported by MRC grant G9408137.
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Present address: Department of Physiology, New York Medical College, New York, NY 10595, USA.