Basket cells

Abstract

Santiago Ramón y Cajal provided a defi nitive description of the basket cells of the cerebellum. Ramón y Cajal discovered a characteristic terminal plexus of basket cells around Purkinje cell somata, naming this the pericellular nest or nid. This was the fi rst clear observation of an axon terminal in the central nervous system; the discovery cultivated his ideas that nerve cells need only be in contact, not in continuity, with one another to transmit nerve impulse, and that the fl ow of the impulse is directed from the axon of one cell to the cell body of another. These ideas later came to fruition as his Neuron Doctrine (Palay S, Chan-Palay V Cerebellar cortex cytology and organization. Springer, Berlin, 1974).