Abstract
The cerebral vasculature is organized to supply the brain’s metabolic needs. Sensory deprivation during the early postnatal period causes altered neural activity and lower metabolic demand. Neural activity is instructional for some aspects of vascular development, and deprivation causes changes in capillary density in the deprived brain region. However, it is not known if the pial arteriole network, which contains many leptomeningeal anastomoses (LMAs) that endow the network with redundancy against occlusions, is also affected by sensory deprivation. We quantified the effects of early-life sensory deprivation via whisker plucking on the densities of LMAs and penetrating arterioles (PAs) in anatomically-identified primary sensory regions (vibrissae cortex, forelimb/hindlimb cortex, visual cortex and auditory cortex) in mice. We found that the densities of penetrating arterioles were the same across cortical regions, though the hindlimb representation had a higher density of LMAs than other sensory regions. We found that the densities of PAs and LMAs, as well as quantitative measures of network topology, were not affected by sensory deprivation. Our results show that the postnatal development of the pial arterial network is robust to sensory deprivation.
Highlights
Neural activity and development is energetically demanding[1,2,3,4], and the glucose and oxygen that supply the needs of neurons and astrocytes must be supplied by blood flow[5,6]
We saw no obvious differences in the positions of the cytochrome oxidase-stained sensory regions between deprived and control animals, and there were no significant differences in the areas of any of the sensory regions between the two groups (Statistical Supplement, p.5)
We analyzed the topology of the pial arteriole network to observe the effects of sensory deprivation on the number of penetrating arterioles, leptomeningeal anastomoses, and higher order network structure
Summary
Neural activity and development is energetically demanding[1,2,3,4], and the glucose and oxygen that supply the needs of neurons and astrocytes must be supplied by blood flow[5,6]. Whisker deprivation will change the spatial and temporal patterns of neural activity in vibrissa-related somatosensory cortex, which will change the patterns of pial arteriole dilations, and flow, in the pial arterial network. We unilaterally deprived mice of their whiskers for the first month of life, a manipulation that is known to decrease capillary density[36], but does not alter the position or shape of the histologically visible cytochrome oxidase staining in barrel cortex[31,33] By keeping this important anatomical landmark intact, we can unambiguously associate pial vasculature features with the underlying brain regions[54,57]. Our results show that the development of the pial arteriole network is robust to sensory deprivation
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