Topographic Polarity of the Optic Tectum Studied by Reimplantation of the Tectal Tissue in Adult Goldfish
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The brain manifests utmost complexities in its structural organization. Several billion nerve cells are intimately interconnected, not at random, but in highly ordered, specific patterns that enable the brain to perform its various versatile functions. How do the functional interconnections among the neural elements of the brain develop during embryogenesis, beginning from a single fertilized egg cell?
During neurogenesis of the visual pathways, for example, many hundreds of thousands of axons sprout out from the retinal ganglion cells in the primitive eye anlage and then preferentially select particular routes to their appropriate destinations in the visual centers of the brain. The functional connections between the retina and the visual centers are formed in a consistent topographic pattern. If the original neural connections between the retina and the midbrain visual center, called the optic tectum, are surgically interrupted in amphibians and teleosts, the proximal parts of the sectioned axons of the...
