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. 2020 Mar 18;41(2):148-156.
doi: 10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2020.020.

Co-localization of two-color rAAV2-retro confirms the dispersion characteristics of efferent projections of mitral cells in mouse accessory olfactory bulb

Ning Zheng  1   2 , Zhi-Zhong Wang  3 , Song-Wei Wang  3 , Fang-Jia Yang  4 , Xu-Tao Zhu  1 , Chen Lu  4 , Anne Manyande  5 , Xiao-Ping Rao  6 , Fu-Qiang Xu  1   2   7
Affiliations

Co-localization of two-color rAAV2-retro confirms the dispersion characteristics of efferent projections of mitral cells in mouse accessory olfactory bulb

Ning Zheng et al. Zool Res. .

Abstract

The accessory olfactory bulb (AOB), located at the posterior dorsal aspect of the main olfactory bulb (MOB), is the first brain relay of the accessory olfactory system (AOS), which can parallelly detect and process volatile and nonvolatile social chemosignals and mediate different sexual and social behaviors with the main olfactory system (MOS). However, due to its anatomical location and absence of specific markers, there is a lack of research on the internal and external neural circuits of the AOB. This issue was addressed by single-color labeling and fluorescent double labeling using retrograde rAAVs injected into the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST), anterior cortical amygdalar area (ACo), medial amygdaloid nucleus (MeA), and posteromedial cortical amygdaloid area (PMCo) in mice. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this AOB projection neuron labeling method and showed that the mitral cells of the AOB exhibited efferent projection dispersion characteristics similar to those of the MOB. Moreover, there were significant differences in the number of neurons projected to different brain regions, which indicated that each mitral cell in the AOB could project to a different number of neurons in different cortices. These results provide a circuitry basis to help understand the mechanism by which pheromone information is encoded and decoded in the AOS.

Keywords: Accessory olfactory bulb; Circuitry basis; Dispersion characteristics; Efferent projections; Projection neuron labeling; Retrograde rAAVs.

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Figures

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1. Mitral cell layer of AOB (MiA) projecting to BST, ACo, MeA, and PMCo
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2. MiA projecting into BST and PMCo simultaneously
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3. MiA projecting into ACo and PMCo simultaneously
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4. MiA projecting into PMCo and MeA simultaneously
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5. MiA projecting into BST and MeA simultaneously
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6. MiA projecting into ACo and MeA simultaneously
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7. Schematic of afferent projections in accessory olfactory system of mice
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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