Abstract
The perigeniculate nucleus (PGN) is a visual part of the thalamic reticular nucleus modulating the information transfer between the lateral geniculate nucleus and the visual cortex. This study focused on the postnatal development of the PGN in cats, using the SMI-32 antibody, which recognizes non-phosphorylated heavy-chain neurofilaments responsible for neuronal structural maturation and is also used as a marker for motion processing, or Y, stream. We questioned whether transient neuronal populations exist in the PGN and can they possibly be related to the Y processing stream. We uncovered a transient, robust SMI-32 staining in the PGN of kittens aged 0–34 days with the significant decline in the cellular density of labeled cells in older animals. According to the double-labeling, in all examined age groups, perigeniculate SMI-32-immunopositive cells are part of the main parvalbumin-positive population. The maximal cellular density of the double-stained cells appeared in animals aged 10–28 days. We also revealed that the most significant growth of perigeniculate cells’s soma occurred at three postnatal weeks. The possible link of our data to the development of the Y visual processing stream and to the heterogeneity of the perigeniculate neuronal population is also discussed.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thanks Nina Nikitina for help in experiments, and for Falcon Scientific Editing (https://falconediting.com) for proofreading the English language in this paper.
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This study was supported by the State Program “Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation”.
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Conceptualization and experimental design (AM, NM); data collection and processing (AM); statistical data treatment (AM, NM); data analysis and interpretation (AM, NM); data supervision (NM); writing and editing the manuscript (AM, NM).
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Merkulyeva, N., Mikhalkin, A. Transient expression of heavy-chain neurofilaments in the perigeniculate nucleus of cats. Brain Struct Funct 229, 489–495 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02752-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02752-6