Innervation of the adult rat cerebellar hemisphere by fibres from the ipsilateral inferior olive following unilateral neonatal pedunculotomy: an autoradiographic and retrograde fluorescent double-labelling study.

A left cerebellar pedunculotomy was carried out in neonatal rats of different ages to deprive the left cerebellar hemisphere of its normal climbing fibre input. In control adult animals this is totally crossed and thus arises only from the contralateral (right) inferior olive. After pedunculotomy, only the left inferior olive was intact, the right being degenerated. The remaining olivocerebellar pathway was investigated using anterograde autoradiographic or retrograde fluorescent double-labelling techniques. The anterograde autoradiographic technique showed that, in these animals, the remaining left inferior olive had an aberrant climbing fibre projection which travelled via the intact right inferior cerebellar peduncle to the denervated left hemicerebellum. If the pedunculotomy was carried out at 3 days of age (P3), this aberrant projection closely mirrored the normal pathway to the opposite hemisphere; pedunculotomy at P7 produced a different pattern of projection; while if the operation was done at P10 there was no new projection. True blue (TB) and diamidino yellow (DY) were injected into the denervated (left) and normal (right) cerebellar hemispheres respectively. Retrograde transport of these tracers confirmed both the aberrant ipsilateral projection and the normal crossed projection from neurons in the remaining inferior olive. Most of the ipsilaterally projecting neurons were in the medial accessory olive. As none of them were double-labelled, it was concluded that the new projection is not a collateral of normally projecting olivary neurons, but arises from a separate population of cells. The significance of these findings in relation to earlier work on this system is discussed.