Affiliations: Department of Pharmacology and Experimental
Therapeutics, University of Maryland School of Medicine, 655 West Baltimore
St., Baltimore, MD 2120 1, USA.
Note: [] Correspondence to: Dr. Douglas O. Frost, Department of
Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, University of Maryland School of
Medicine, 655 West Baltimore St., Baltimore, MD 2120 1, USA. Tel.: + 1 410 706
0413; Fax: + 1 410 706 0032; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: Lesions of eerebral targets of the retina in newborn hamsters, when
combined with transection of lemniscal pathways to the primary auditory or
somatosensory thalamic nuclei or the secondary thalamic visual nucleus, can
induce the formation of permanent retinal projections to the deafferented
non-visual structures. These projections are retinotopically organized and form
functional synapses. Consequently, neurons in the auditory or somatosensory
cortices, which normally are not driven by visual stimuli, become visually
responsive and have receptive field properties that ressemble, in several
important ways, those of neurons in the visual cortex of normal animals. The
surgically-induced retinothalamo-cortical pathways can mediate visually guided
behaviors whose normal substrate, the pathway from the retina to the primary
visual cortex via the thalamic dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, is
missing.
