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Functional changes at periphery and cortex following dorsal root lesions in adult monkeys

Nature Neuroscience volume 3, pages 476–481 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

Chronic peripheral nerve injuries produce neural changes at different levels of the somatosensory pathway, but these responses remain poorly defined. We selectively removed cutaneous input from the index finger and thumb in young adult macaque monkeys by lesioning dorsal rootlets to examine both immediate and long-term systemic responses to this deficit. Corresponding digit representations within somatosensory cortex (SI) were initially silenced, but two to seven months later again responded to cutaneous stimulation of the ‘deafferented’ digits. We remapped cutaneous receptive fields (RFs) within adjacent intact dorsal rootlets two to four months after lesioning. RF distributions had greatly expanded, so that rootlets previously innervating adjacent hand regions now responded to stimulation of the index finger and/or thumb. Thus our results demonstrate peripherally mediated central reorganization.

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Figure 1: Receptive field maps obtained before and immediately after making selective dorsal rootlet lesions to remove cutaneous input from the index finger (D2) and thumb (D1) of the left hand.
Figure 2: Two examples of cutaneous RF maps obtained from dorsal rootlets immediately before lesion, and for peri-lesion rootlets and corresponding somatosensory cortex obtained during the terminal experiment.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Project Grants 960246 and 990097 awarded by the Australian NHMRC. We thank Ken Miller and Tony Goodwin for comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 3010, Victoria, Australia

    Corinna Darian-Smith & Sophie Brown

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  1. Corinna Darian-Smith
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Correspondence to Corinna Darian-Smith.

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Darian-Smith, C., Brown, S. Functional changes at periphery and cortex following dorsal root lesions in adult monkeys. Nat Neurosci 3, 476–481 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/74852

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