Postnatal Development of Corticospinal Projections from Motor Cortex to the Cervical Enlargement in the Macaque Monkey
The Journal of Neuroscience, January 1, 1997, 17(1):251–266 Postnatal Development of Corticospinal Projections from Motor Cortex to the Cervical Enlargement in the Macaque Monkey J. Armand,1 E. Olivier,2 S. A. Edgley,3 and R. N. Lemon2 1Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, 13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France, 2Sobell Department of Neurophysiology, Institute of Neurology, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom, and 3Department of Anatomy, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 3DY, United Kingdom The postnatal development of corticospinal projections was occupied only 40% of the hand motor nuclei in the first thoracic investigated in 11 macaques by means of the anterograde segment at 1 month, 73% at 5 months, and 75.5% at 3 years. transport of wheat germ agglutin–horseradish peroxidase in- A caudo-rostral gradient of termination density within the hand jected into the primary motor cortex hand area. Although the motor nuclei was present throughout development and per- fibers of the corticospinal tract reached all levels of the spinal sisted into the adult. As a consequence, the more caudal the cord white matter at birth, their penetration into the gray matter segment within the cervical enlargement, the earlier the adult was far from complete. At birth, as in the adult, corticospinal pattern of projection density was reached. No transitory corti- projections were distributed to the same regions of the inter- cospinal projections were found. The continuous postnatal ex- mediate zone, although they showed marked increases in den- pansion of cortico-motoneuronal projections to hand motor sity during the first 5 months.
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