Morphological and neurochemical characterization of electrophysiologically identified cells

Abstract

It is now well known that there are many neuron subtypes in brain. For instance, a few subtypes of pyramidal cell in each layer and 10 or more non-pyramidal cell subtypes are found in neocortex. Their activity and functional role in the microcircuit are different among each cell subtype. Therefore, neuron subtype identification is very important to understand the functional role of the recorded neurons whose physiological firing properties are studied. Neuronal subtypes are morphologically and neurochemically distinct, so histological and immunohistochemical staining of the recorded cells promotes the cell identification. In this chapter, histological tissue preparation methods, for chemical marker identification, dendritic and axonal arborization tracing analysis, and observation by electron microscopy including block face scanning microscopy, of biocytin-injected recorded cells are described.