Crossed pathways from the entorhinal area to the fascia dentata. I. Normal in rabbits

Abstract

The entorhinal area projects to the Ammon's horn and the fascia dentata by way of the medial and lateral perforant paths that originate in the medial and lateral part of that area, respectively. The two tracts terminate at different laminar levels in the molecular layers of the ipsilateral hippocampal regio inferior and fascia dentata. Using the Fink-Heimer technique, each of the perforant paths in the normal rabbit is now shown to innervate the antero-dorsal extremes of the Ammon's horn and fascia dentata in both hemispheres. The crossed and uncrossed components of each path innervate homotopic zones on each side. This bilateral innervation contrasts with the situation in the rat where only very weak crossed components exist. Degeneration particles in the fascia dentata contralateral to a lesion of the perforant paths diminish in number along the course of the fibers as they proceed away from the midline, but are traceable for several millimeters. Crossed fibers are shown to pass from one hemisphere into the other directly through the fused molecular layers of the fasciae dentatae. The bilateral innervation in the rabbit indicates that even though the axons of the perforant paths are highly specific with respect to the class of neuron and the dendritic segments upon which they form synapses, they apparently do no possess a mechanism by which they can distinguish between the receptive fields in the two hemispheres. It is concluded that during ontogeny the perforant path fibers from both sides most likely compete for available synaptic sites in the rostral part of their terminal fields and that their relative amounts in the two hemispheres is governed by spatial and temporal factors.