The way long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD) are integrated within the different synapses of brain neuronal circuits is poorly understood. In order to progress beyond the identification of specific molecular mechanisms, a system in which multiple forms of plasticity can be correlated with large-scale neural processing is required. In this paper we take as an example the cerebellar ...

Age-related changes of the monoaminoxidases, evaluated by enzymatic staining, quantitative analysis of images, biochemical assay and statistical analysis of data were studied in cerebellar cortex of young (3-month-old) and aged (26-month-old) male Sprague-Dawley rats. The enzymatic staining shows the presence of monoamino-oxidases within the molecular and granular layers as well as within the P...

The cytoarchitecture of the rat cerebellar cortex was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) after exposure of cell surfaces by NaOH maceration and subsequent mild mechanical dissection. SEM observation clearly differentiated the three layers of the cerebellar cortex: the molecular layer, which consisted of a dense accumulation of thin nerve fibers; the Purkinje cell layer, in which larg...

INTRODUCTION Sulf1 and Sulf2 are cell surface sulfatases, which remove specific 6-O-sulfate groups from heparan sulfate (HS) proteoglycans, resulting in modulation of various HS-dependent signaling pathways. Both Sulf1 and Sulf2 knockout mice show impairments in brain development and neurite outgrowth deficits in neurons. METHODOLOGY AND MAIN FINDINGS To analyze the molecular mechanisms behin...

Granule cells (GC) are the most numerous glutamatergic neurons in the cerebellar cortex and represent almost half of the neurons of the central nervous system. Despite recent advances, the mechanisms of how the glutamatergic synapses are formed in the cerebellum remain unclear. Among the TGF-β family, TGF-beta 1 (TGF-β1) has been described as a synaptogenic molecule in invertebrates and in the ...

Animal studies have shown that prenatal stress is able to induce long-lasting neurobiological and behavioral alterations in adult offspring. In spite of the facts that hippocampus is sensitive to early developmental influences and its known functional importance in learning and memory, few data are available on the effect of prenatal stress on the structure of hippocampus. Therefore, this study...

Classically, mossy fiber and climbing fiber terminals are regarded as having very different spatial distributions in the cerebellar cortex. However, previous anatomical studies have not studied these two major cerebellar inputs with sufficient resolution to confirm this assumption. Here, we examine the detailed pattern of collateralization of both types of cerebellar afferent using small inject...

The cerebellar granular layer has been suggested to perform a complex spatiotemporal reconfiguration of incoming mossy fiber signals. Central to this role is the inhibitory action exerted by Golgi cells over granule cells: Golgi cells inhibit granule cells through both feedforward and feedback inhibitory loops and generate a broad lateral inhibition that extends beyond the afferent synaptic fie...