Summary
The findings from the present EM-autoradiography experiments identify the cerebellar nucleocortical projection as a mossy fiber-type pathway. In these studies orthogradely labelled axons and terminals were observed in the folial white matter and granule cell layer, with only background levels of silver grains over the Purkinje cell and molecular layers. Most nucleocortical axons synapsed within cerebellar glomeruli either at en passant contacts along dilated segments of unmyelinated axons or at multilobulated (terminal) expansions of the axons. Typically these synaptic junctions were of the asymmetrical type containing clear round vesicles. Usually, each labelled mossy fiber rosette synapsed on a large number of small terminal dendrites of granule cells; however, occasionally a series of 4–8 asymmetric contacts were noted on a single large dendrite. Labelled nucleocortical terminals were occasionally present in the nonglomerular neuropil between granule cell bodies where they contacted large dendrites of Golgi cells.
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This work was supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service Grants BRSG 410 and NIH fellowship NS0557. Preliminary reports of this work have been presented at the 9th Society for Neuroscience meeting and at the Fogarty International Center Conference on “The Cerebellum: New Vistas”, Bethesda, Maryland, May 1980
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Tolbert, D., Kultas-Ilinsky, K. & Ilinsky, I. EM-Autoradiography of cerebellar nucleocortical terminals in the cat. Anat Embryol 161, 215–223 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00305345
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00305345