The normal development of sensory perception in mammals depends on appropriate sensory experience between birth and maturity. Numerous reports have shown that trimming some or all of the large mystacial vibrissa (whiskers) on one side of the face after birth has a detrimental effect on the maturation of cortical function. The objective of the present study was to understand the differences that...

In the barrel cortex, several features of single-whisker stimuli are organized in functional maps. The barrel cortex also encodes spatio-temporal correlation patterns of multi-whisker inputs, but so far the cortical mapping of neurons tuned to such input statistics is unknown. Here we report that layer 2/3 of the rat barrel cortex contains an additional functional map based on neuronal tuning t...

Neuronal activity is regulated in a homeostatic manner through changes in inhibitory GABA and excitatory glutamate (Glu) AMPA (A) receptors (GluARs). Using immunofluorescent staining, we examined whether calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IIα (CaMKIIα)-labeled (+) excitatory neurons in the barrel cortex undergo such homeostatic regulation following enforced waking with associated corti...

Precursor-reduction method is employed to synthesize nanostructures of ZnTe. The shape of zinc blende ZnTe nanocrystals could be influenced by reaction temperature, concentration of the precursors as well as the use of stabilizing agent. By controlling the synthetic conditions, three types of nanoscaled ZnTe, quasi-spherical ZnTe nanocrystals, ZnTe nanobelts and ZnTe nanorods have been observed...

Perception is usually an active process by which action selects and affects sensory information. During rodent active touch, whisker kinematics influences how objects activate sensory receptors. In order to fully characterize whisker motion, we reconstructed whisker position in 3D and decomposed whisker motion to all its degrees of freedom. We found that, across behavioral modes, in both head-f...

The sense of touch is represented by neural activity patterns evoked by mechanosensory input forces. The rodent whisker system is exceptional for studying the neurophysiology of touch in part because these forces can be precisely computed from video of whisker deformation. We evaluate the accuracy of a standard model of whisker bending, which assumes quasi-static dynamics and a linearly tapered...

Neurons in the barrel cortex and the thalamus respond preferentially to stimulation of one whisker (the principal whisker) and weakly to several adjacent whiskers. Cortical neurons, unlike thalamic cells, gradually adapt to repeated whisker stimulations. Whether cortical adaptation is specific to the stimulated whisker is not known. The aim of this intracellular study was to determine whether t...

Whisker plucking in developing and adult rats provides a convenient method of temporarily altering tactile input for the purposes of studying experience-dependent plasticity in the somatosensory cortex. Yet, a comprehensive examination of the effect of whisker plucking on the response properties of whisker follicle-innervating trigeminal ganglion (NVg) neurons is lacking. We used extracellular ...

Whisker movement has been shown to be under active control in certain specialist animals such as rats and mice. Though this whisker movement is well characterized, the role and effect of this movement on subsequent sensing is poorly understood. One method for investigating this phenomena is to generate artificial whisker deflections with robotic hardware under different movement conditions. A l...