The capacity of adult barrel cortex to show experience-dependent plasticity after early restricted neonatal sensory deprivation was analyzed in barrel field cortex neurons. Selective sensory deprivation was induced by trimming two whiskers from postnatal day 0 (P0) to P21, namely, the principal D2 whisker plus one adjacent surround whisker (D3). At maturity (P90), responses of supragranular (la...

The rat vibrissal system is an important model for the study of somatosensation, but the small size and rapid speed of the vibrissae have precluded measuring precise vibrissal-object contact sequences during behavior. We used a laser light sheet to quantify, with 1 ms resolution, the spatiotemporal structure of whisker-surface contact as five naïve rats freely explored a flat, vertical glass wa...

We deal with a perturbation of a hyperbolic integrable Hamiltonian system with n degrees of freedom The integrable system is assumed to have n dimensional hyperbolic invariant tori with coincident whiskers separatrices Following Eliasson we use a geometric approach closely related to the Lagrangian properties of the whiskers to show that the splitting distance between the perturbed stable and u...

Using their large mystacial vibrissas, rats perform a variety of tasks, including localization and identification of objects. We report on the discriminatory thresholds and behavior of rats trained in a horizontal object localization task. Using an adaptive training procedure, rats learned to discriminate offsets in horizontal (anteroposterior) location with all, one row, or one arc of whiskers...

This study used extracellular unit recordings in behaving animals to evaluate thalamocortical response transformations in the rat whisker-barrel system. Based on previous acute studies using controlled whisker stimulation, we hypothesized that in a cortical barrel adjacent (non-principal) whiskers exert a net inhibitory effect. In contrast, in thalamic barreloid neurons, the effects of neighbor...

Whisker evoked fast oscillations (FOs; >200 Hz) within the rodent posteromedial barrel subfield are thought to reflect very rapid integration of multiwhisker stimuli, yet the pathways mediating FO interactions remain unclear and may involve interactions within thalamus and/or cortex. In the present study using anesthetized rats, a cortical incision was made between sites representing the stimul...

A universally applicable method for promoting the fast formation and growth of high-density Sn whiskers on solders was developed by fabricating Mg/Sn-based solder/Mg joints using ultrasonic-assisted soldering at 250 °C for 6 s and then subjected to thermal aging at 25 °C for 7 d. The results showed that the use of the ultrasonic-assisted soldering could produce the supersaturated dissolution of...

Understanding how whisker-based tactile information is represented in the nervous system requires quantification of sensory input and observation of neural activity during whisking and whisker touch. Chronic electrophysiological methods have long been available to study neural responses in awake and behaving animals; however, methods to quantify the sensory input on whiskers have not yet been d...

Clearance of Inhaled Potassium Octatitanate Whisker from Rat Lungs: Hiroshi YAMATO, et al. Department of Environmental Health Engineering, University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan—The clearance rate of inhaled man-made fibers (MMFs) is one of the important factors for predicting health hazards in human. Potassium octatitanate whisker is a newly developed MMF in Japan with stro...

Voigts J, Sakmann B, Celikel T. Unsupervised whisker tracking in unrestrained behaving animals. J Neurophysiol 100: 504–515, 2008. First published May 7, 2008; doi:10.1152/jn.00012.2008. Understanding how whisker-based tactile information is represented in the nervous system requires quantification of sensory input and observation of neural activity during whisking and whisker touch. Chronic el...