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Postnatal development of dendritic structure of layer III pyramidal neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex of marmoset

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Abstract

In the primate cerebral cortex, dendritic spines rapidly increase in number after birth up to infancy or mid-childhood, and then decrease towards adulthood. Abnormalities in these processes accompany several psychiatric disorders. In this study, we examined developmental changes of basal dendrites and spines of layer III pyramidal cells in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the common marmoset. The mPFC consists of several areas with distinct features in layer organization, histochemistry, connections, and, in humans, vulnerability to psychiatric disorders. We selected three areas for examination: granular dorsomedial prefrontal (area 8B/9), dysgranular ventromedial prefrontal (area 14r), and agranular anterior cingulate (area 24) cortices. Dendritic field areas, lengths, number of branching points, and total spine number reached a peak at 2–3 postnatal months in all three areas. However, the profiles of spine formation and pruning differed across the three areas with different degrees of granularity; the amount of spine loss from the peak to adulthood was less in areas 24 (33 %) and 14r (29 %) than in area 8B/9 (43 %). Disturbance of this modest spine pruning in the less granular cortical areas may lead to an excessive loss of spines reported for areas 24 and 14r of schizophrenic patients.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an Intramural Research Grant (grant number 23-7) for Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders from the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, by a Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology (FIRST Program), by the Strategic Research Program for Brain Science, by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Shitsukan” (No. 22135007), “Foundation of Synapse Neurocircuit Pathology” (No. 25110740), “Glia-Assembly” (No. 25117001), and “Seishun-no” (No. 26118717) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), Japan (to N.I.), and by grants (Nos. 23240047 and 23135522) from MEXT, Japan (to I.F). T.O. was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (Comprehensive Brain Science Network) from MEXT, Japan. We thank Takako Suzuki, Tomoko Manabe, and Dr. Taku Banno of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry for their technical assistance. We also thank Dr. Keiko Nakagaki of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry and Yu Nabeshima and Ryoichi Saito of CLEA Japan, Inc. for their support in the conduct of experiments.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationship that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ultrastructural Research, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, National Institute of Neuroscience, 4-1-1 Ogawa-Higashi, Kodaira, Tokyo, 187-8502, Japan

    Tetsuya Sasaki, Hirosato Aoi, Tomofumi Oga & Noritaka Ichinohe

  2. Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, 1-4 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Hirosato Aoi, Tomofumi Oga & Ichiro Fujita

  3. Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Osaka University, 1-4 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Ichiro Fujita

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  1. Tetsuya Sasaki
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  2. Hirosato Aoi
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  3. Tomofumi Oga
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  4. Ichiro Fujita
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  5. Noritaka Ichinohe
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Correspondence to Noritaka Ichinohe.

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T. Sasaki and H. Aoi contributed equally to this work.

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Sasaki, T., Aoi, H., Oga, T. et al. Postnatal development of dendritic structure of layer III pyramidal neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex of marmoset. Brain Struct Funct 220, 3245–3258 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-014-0853-2

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