Summary
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1.
Extracellular microelectrode recording has been employed to study the responses of three types of interneurones in the cat cerebellar cortex: basket cells, superficial stellate cells and Golgi cells. The large unitary spike potentials of single cells were sharply localized and presumably were generated by impulse discharges from the cell somata. The characteristics of their responses described below sharply distinguished them from Purkinje cells.
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2.
The parallel fibre volleys generated by surface stimulation of a folium evoked brief repetitive discharges that were graded in respect of frequency and number. Maximum responses had as many as 10 impulses at an initial frequency of 500/sec.
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3.
At brief test intervals there was facilitation of the response to a second parallel fibre volley; at about 50 msec it passed over to depression for over 500 msec.
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4.
Stimulation deep in the cerebellum in the region of the fastigial nucleus (juxta-fastigial, J.F.) evoked by synaptic action a single or double discharge, presumably by the mossy fibre-granule cell-parallel fibre path, but climbing fibre stimulation from the inferior olive also usually had a weak excitatory action evoking never more than one impulse.
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J.F. stimulation also had an inhibitory action on the repetitive discharge evoked by a parallel fibre volley. Possibly this is due to the inhibitory action of impulses in Purkinje cell axon collaterals.
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There was a slow (7–30/sec) and rather irregular background discharge from all interneurones. The inhibitory actions of parallel fibre and J.F. stimulation silenced this discharge for some hundreds of milliseconds, probably by Golgi cell inhibition of a background mossy fibre input into granule cells.
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7.
All these various features were displayed by cells at depths from 180 to 500 μ; hence it was concluded that superficial stellate, basket and Golgi cells have similar properties, discrimination being possible only by depth, the respective depth ranges being superficial to 250μ, 250μ to 400μ, and deeper than 400μ.
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Eccles, J.C., Llinás, R. & Sasaki, K. The inhibitory interneurones within the cerebellar cortex. Exp Brain Res 1, 1–16 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00235206
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00235206