Nissl-stained thalamocortical sections from ThVGdKO mice at P7 and P14 were grossly normal, with the obvious exception of L4 in somatosensory cortex of ThVGdKO mice, which lacked barrels ( Figures 2B and 2D, arrows in 2D). Thalamocortical axon innervation of the somatosensory cortex was also grossly

normal, as revealed by immunolabeling for serotonin transporter (5-HTT) in thalamocortical axons at P6 ( Figure 2C) and direct imaging of thalamocortical afferents at P14 following the injection of a floxed-tdTomato viral construct into the thalamus of Sert-Cre mice ( Figure 2E), again with the obvious Romidepsin molecular weight exception of disrupted barrel clusters in somatosensory cortex of ThVGdKO mice. The formation of cortical barrels is contingent on intact barrel structures in the thalamus (barreloids) and brainstem (barelettes; Li and Crair, 2011), but CO staining in coronal sections through the PF-01367338 nmr ventrobasal thalamus and brainstem showed typical barrel

patterns in these structures ( Figure S1B). These results indicate that the emergence of cortical cytoarchitecture and the clustering of thalamocortical afferents into a barrel pattern depend critically on glutamatergic neurotransmission in thalamocortical neurons, suggesting a key role for extrinsic, presumably activity-dependent factors in Etomidate cortical columnar development. The absence of barrels in the somatosensory

cortex of ThVGdKO mice is consistent with previous reports showing that cortical barrel topography is sensitively dependent on the presence, number and arrangement of whiskers on the contralateral snout and specifically implicates thalamocortical neurotransmission in communicating the peripheral sensory pattern onto the cortex (Van der Loos and Woolsey, 1973 and Welker and Van der Loos, 1986). We wondered whether the elimination of thalamocortical glutamatergic neurotransmission would disrupt cortical laminar organization because the distinctive granular nature of L4 is unique to sensory areas of cortex that receive extensive thalamic innervation. At postnatal day 6 (P6), when barrels have just formed, Nissl staining showed that cortical thickness and lamination in ThVGdKO mice was no different than littermate controls (Figures 2B, 3A, and 3B; Figures S1D and S1E). To our surprise, noticeable differences in cortical lamination emerged in the second week after birth, when superficial layers of the cortex undergo their most dramatic elaboration (Figures 2D, 3C, and 3D; Figure S1F). In particular, the characteristic dense band of granular cells (L4) at midcortical depths was blurred in ThVGdKO mice at P15 and replaced by a relatively cell-sparse layer resembling L5a.