The latest preprint from the Hansel lab at UChicago. My excellent grad colleague Abby Silbaugh shows that activating a supervisory signal local to the cerebellum can, via thalamus, influence whisker stim-induced plasticity in mouse S1. A fantastic demo that the brain + its plasticity is distributed!

Cerebellum instructs plasticity in the mouse primary somatosensory cortex Sensory experiences map onto distributed neural networks and may activate plasticity processes that in some brain areas are supervised by instructive signals. What remains unknown, however, is if such...

This preprint suggests the cerebellum instructs neocortical plasticity via the thalamus:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very cool if this holds, a really important finding!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: plasticity in the brain is less "local" than most people think.

🧠📈 🧪

Thanks Cedric!

Huge thanks goes to my mentor Christian Hansel, the UChicago neuro institute, and to many for their ideas and feedback along the way: @tingfenglin.bsky.social, Abby Silbaugh, Aurora Ferrell, Donald Huang, Ruth Anne Eatock, Wei Wei, Mark Sheffield, and Peggy Mason

Purkinje cells of similar morphologies also tended to cluster near each other. If morphology dictates some features of PC function, then this cell-cell clustering may generate patches of functional similarity in the cortex

Building on our 2023 analysis of PC morphology by region, the anterior-posterior gradient in the hemispheres is bilateral, distinct from the pattern in vermis (in both species), and inter-hemisphere similarity covaries with functional symmetry

Using peripherin as a putative label for climbing fibers (CFs), we show that human PCs can indeed receive multiple CFs (and on separate dendritic compartments), confirming a hypothesis from our previous work

Outward growth of dendrites (w conserved diameter but 3x longer individual branches) may influence how human cells sample and integrate input. Human dendritic spines are also denser, larger, and show more complex morphologies including a ‘spine cluster’ motif

Despite having only 2x thicker cerebellar cortex, human Purkinje cell (PC) dendrites spread laterally to a total length 11x longer than mouse. This far exceeds our previous measure, revealing they are >2x the total length of human pyramidal neurons

Non-allometric expansion and enhanced compartmentalization of Purkinje cell dendrites in the human cerebellum A comparative study of Purkinje dendrite morphology, input arrangement, and regional subtype distribution shows human cells evade constraint by cortical thickness to be both quantitatively and qualita...

Inspired by Cajal, the Hansel lab’s new work in @eLife provides a comparative histological analysis of human and mouse Purkinje cell morphology. Following our 2023 study, we detail differences of scale and kind between the neurons of the two species 🧵⬇️
elifesciences.org/articles/105...

Human neurons are incredibly complex and Purkinje cells are, by far, the largest in our brain. We give a detailed characterization of their dendrite and spine morphology and distribution across cerebellar regions compared with mouse. Check it out!

The aliens are within.....

For my first blue post, a blue Purkinje cell!

This cell was loaded with dye during whole cell patch clamp in sliced mouse tissue, and oops, some dye spilled out on the granule cells below during the approach...