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  • Title: Morphology and somatotopy of the central arborizations of rapidly adapting glabrous skin afferents in the rat lumbar spinal cord.
    Author: Shortland P, Woolf CJ.
    Journal: J Comp Neurol; 1993 Mar 22; 329(4):491-511. PubMed ID: 8454737.
    Abstract:
    The central arborizations in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord of 23 rapidly adapting (RA) A-beta primary afferent neurons innervating different regions of the glabrous skin of the hindpaw were studied by the intra-axonal injection of horseradish peroxidase in adult rats. A total of 284 arbors of the complex, simple, and blind-ending variety were recovered. The arbors of RA afferents innervating the toes, paw pads, and non-pad hindpaw differed from each other in branch pattern and dimensions. The simple and complex arbors, which are both bouton-containing, were distributed mainly in laminae III-V, although some complex arbors projected dorsally into lamina IIi. The hindpaw glabrous skin afferent terminals were located in the lumbar enlargement from caudal L3 to rostral L6. A crude somatotopic organization was observed such that toes 1-5 were represented successively in more caudal positions from mid-L4 to caudal L5. The paw pads were organized in a rostrocaudal sequence moving from the paw pads proximal to toe 1 across the foot to the paw pads proximal to toe 5, from caudal L3 to mid-L5. Non-pad hindpaw afferents were located in caudal L5. Overlap between toe, paw pad and non-pad afferent central fields was present, however, and the central terminals of afferents with non-adjacent peripheral receptive fields were shown to occupy the same region of the dorsal horn.
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