Complete morphologies of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons in the mouse

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Abstract

The basal forebrain cholinergic system modulates neuronal excitability and vascular tone throughout the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. This system is severely affected in Alzheimer's disease (AD), and drug treatment to enhance cholinergic signaling is widely used as symptomatic therapy in AD. Defining the full morphologies of individual basal forebrain cholinergic neurons has, until now, been technically beyond reach due to their large axon arbor sizes. Using genetically-directed sparse labeling, we have characterized the complete morphologies of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons in the mouse. Individual arbors were observed to span multiple cortical columns, and to have

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Hao Wu

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
John Williams

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Jeremy Nathans

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States

For correspondence
jnathans@jhmi.edu

Competing interests
Jeremy Nathans, Reviewing editor, eLife.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocol MO13M469 of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.