I just get very puzzled when reading some paper results about brain slice work, when the author stimulates one intracortical region and records the response of another intracortical region, how can I know whether it is direct connection between these two regions or may involve other subcortical regions, eg the thalamus? I didn't find any evidence in the paper about preserving the thalamocortical pathway or not. How can I understand the results in these kinds of paper?
Hope anybody expert in brain slice work can help me with this. Thanks
Hello, although I am not an expert in slices, I guess you may try retrograde or anterograde labeling of thalamocortical projections by DiI or similar lipophilic compound. Chech, for example, a paper from Enriquez-Barret, 2012. Such axonal tracings using DiI have been also done in another brain areas, such as corpus callosum (Niquille 2009, Nishikimi 2011). Good luck!
@ Jakub Thanks for answer and recommended paper, dear friend. Your method will be very useful to help me check the direct connection between regions. Actually, I also wonder the standard way to check the pathway preservation when doing slice work, like electrophysiology~All my best
Hi, If I would attempt to study thalamocortical circuitry I would start with reading paper attached. It does evaluate preservation of thalamocortical pathway using both electrophysiology and Dil. Best!
Thank for all kind suggestion. I have got the idea to do it now. And also learn to get information in literature in the future.
Best to all
I had follow the Agmon and Connor´methods to use fluorecense microscopy with Fluo-4 in thalamo-cortical slices, and to my it had beeb usefully.
Why not try optogenetic animals.You can activate thalamus nucleus, then record activity of cortex.
Tracing is necessary. An alternative to DiI is biocytin. See attached PDF.
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