Cable properties of cat spinal motoneurones measured by combining voltage clamp, current clamp and intracellular staining.

1. Spinal alpha-motoneurones were injected with horseradish peroxidase after measuring their voltage response to a brief current pulse and their current response to a small voltage step. 2. The morphology of each motoneurone was reconstructed from serial sections. The diameters and lengths of dendritic segments were used to build a compartmental model of each neurone's electrotonic structure. The specific resistivity of the membrane (Rm) was assumed to be constant throughout the dendrites, but it was lowered for the somatic membrane by the introduction of a somatic shunt resistance. 3. The specific resistances of the somatic and dendritic membrane were adjusted in the compartmental model until the responses of the model to the same current and voltage steps as those used in the experiment gave the best fits to the recorded transients. Satisfactory fits were obtained for six out of seven motoneurones. Dendritic Rm varied from 7 to 35 k omega cm2 and somatic Rm varied from 100 to 420 omega cm2. The dendritic Rm was 100-300 times the somatic Rm for different neurones. 4. The calculated dendritic Rm was used to determine the geometric profile of the equivalent dendritic cable. This was found to be an approximately uniform cylinder for about 0.5 lambda and thereafter to taper rapidly to a final termination at 2-3 lambda from the soma. 5. The results indicate that motoneurone dendrites are more electrically compact than was hitherto believed. The different Rm values for somatic and dendritic membrane, and the tapering of the dendritic cable, means that the cable model developed by Rall (1959, 1964) must be revised to take account of these spatial and electrical non-uniformities.