Purkinje cells (PCs) of the cerebellar cortex are necessary for controlling movement with precision, but a mechanistic explanation of how the activity of these inhibitory neurons regulates motor output is still lacking. We used an optogenetic approach in awake mice to show for the first time that transiently suppressing spontaneous activity in a population of PCs is sufficient to cause discrete...

Astrocytes are a diverse and morphologically complex class of glial cells restricted to the central nervous system which have been implicated in modulation neuronal activity. The cerebellum is involved planning movements motor learning. Within three deep cerebellar nuclei (dentate, interposed fastigial) provide sole output. fastigial nucleus participates saccadic vestibular function, recent evi...

Many cerebellar neurons fire spontaneously, generating 10-100 action potentials per second even without synaptic input. This high basal activity correlates with information-coding mechanisms that differ from those of cells that are quiescent until excited synaptically. For example, in the deep cerebellar nuclei, Hebbian patterns of coincident synaptic excitation and postsynaptic firing fail to ...

Cerebellum is part of the brain that occupies only 10% of the brain volume, but it contains about 80% of total number of brain neurons. New cerebellar function model is developed that sets cerebellar circuits in context of multibody dynamics model computations, as important step in controlling balance and movement coordination, functions performed by two oldest parts of the cerebellum. Model gi...

BACKGROUND Cerebellar repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation may be effective in reducing peak-dose levodopa induced dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease patients. It was proposed that the antidyskinetic effect could be due to modulation of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathways. However the neural basis for these clinical effects have not yet been demonstrated. METHODS We investigated the ef...

The cerebellum is a brain region responsible for motor coordination and for refining motor programs. While a great deal is known about the structure and connectivity of the mammalian cerebellum, fundamental questions regarding its function in behavior remain unanswered. Recently, the zebrafish has emerged as a useful model organism for cerebellar studies, owing in part to the similarity in cere...

Motor thalamic nuclei, ventral anterior (VA), ventral lateral (VL) and ventral medial (VM) nuclei, receive massive glutamatergic and GABAergic afferents from the cerebellum and basal ganglia, respectively. In the present study, these afferents were characterized with immunoreactivities for glutamic acid decarboxylase of 67 kDa (GAD67) and vesicular glutamate transporter (VGluT)2, and examined b...

The interposed nuclei (IN) of the intermediate cerebellum are critical components of the circuits that control associative learning of eyeblinks and other defensive reflexes in mammals. The IN, which represent the sole output of the intermediate cerebellum, receive massive GABAergic input from Purkinje cells of the cerebellar cortex and are thought to contribute to the acquisition and performan...