Groups of pregnant rats were injected with two successive daily doses of 3H-thymidine from gestational days 13 and 14 (E13 + 14) until the day before birth (E21 + 22). With this progressively delayed comprehensive labelling procedure we determined the time of origin of neurons in the nuclei of the epithalamus, thalamus, and ventral thalamus. The zona incerta, subthalamic nucleus, reticular nucl...

Background light intensity (irradiance) substantially impacts the visual code in the early visual system at synaptic and single-neuron levels, but its influence on population activity is largely unexplored. We show that fast narrowband oscillations, an important feature of population activity, systematically increase in amplitude as a function of irradiance in both anesthetized and awake, freel...

We review results on the in vivo properties of neurons in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) that receives its afferent input from the retina and projects to the visual cortex. In addition, the dLGN receives input from the brain stem and from a rather strong corticothalamic back-projection, which originates in layer 6 of the visual cortex. We compare the behaviour of dLGN cells during...

We present a quantitative description of single-cell visual response properties in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) of anesthetized adult mice lacking the beta2 subunit of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (beta2-/-) and compare these response properties with data from wild-type animals. Some response features, including all spatial receptive field characteristics and bursting be...

In the present study, we quantified the distribution of growth cones and synapses in 2 developing layers, as well as in the intervening interlaminar space of the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) in tree shrews. Our goal was to gain insight into mechanisms involved in the segregation of dLGN cells into layers during development. We sacrificed tree shrews before (P0), during (P4 and P7), ...

The dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) receives visual information from the retina and transmits it to the cortex. In this study, we made extracellular recordings in the dLGN of both anesthetized and awake mice, and found that a surprisingly high proportion of cells were selective for stimulus orientation. The orientation selectivity of dLGN cells was unchanged after silencing the visual ...

In many brain regions, inhibition is mediated by numerous classes of specialized interneurons, but within the rodent dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN), a single class of interneuron is present. dLGN interneurons inhibit thalamocortical (TC) neurons and regulate the activity of TC neurons evoked by retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), thereby controlling the visually evoked signals reaching the...

The role of gamma-aminobutyric acid(B) (GABA(B)) receptors in spatial and temporal properties of the neurons was investigated in the cat dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) using flashing spot and drifting grating stimuli. Iontophoresis of baclofen, the selective GABA(B) receptor agonist significantly decreased the spontaneous and visual evoked responses (decreased to 38+/-7%), in which on...

Histological effects of Monosodium glutamate (MSG) commonly used as food additive on the medial geniculate body (MGB) of adult wistar rats were carefully studied. The rats of both sexes (n=24), average weight of 185g were randomly assigned into two treatments (n=16) and control (n=8) groups. The rats in the treatment groups received 3g and 6g of MSG thoroughly mixed with their feeds for fourtee...

The visual cortex of opossum was studied by injecting horseradish peroxidase into the cortex and identifying labeled neurons in the thalamus. The results show that the lateral geniculate nucleus projects to area 17 in a topographical manner: the rostral lateral geniculate is represented in caudal striate cortex, and the dorsal extremity of the lateral geniculate, which probably corresponds to t...