The combined effects of unilateral enucleation and rearing in a 'dim' red light on synapse-to-neuron ratios in the rat visual cortex.

One day old rats had their right eyes removed and together with non-enucleated controls were raised in either 'light' or 'dark' (red light) conditions from birth until 39 days of age. This resulted in four groups of animals: light-reared enucleated, light-reared non-enucleated, dark-reared enucleated and dark-reared non-enucleated. All animals were killed by intracardiac perfusion with 2.5% sodium cacodylate-buffered glutaraldehyde at 39 days of age. Pieces of visual cortex (Area 17) from both right and left cerebral hemispheres of each animal were dissected out and processed for electron microscopy. Stereological procedures were used to estimate the synapse-to-neuron ratios in Layers II-III of these cortices. Light-reared non-enucleated rats had about 16,000 synapses per neuron in both right and left visual cortices. Rearing non-enucleated rats in the dark reduced this value to about 11,500. The synapse-to-neuron ratio of unilaterally enucleated rats raised in the light was not significantly different from that observed in light-reared non-enucleated rats. Combined dark-rearing and unilateral enucleation did reduce the synapse-to-neuron ratio but not to any greater extent than did dark-rearing alone. However, there was a suggestion of a differential effect between the right and left cortices in these enucleated, dark-reared animals. These results demonstrate the importance of light stimulation for the normal development of interneuronal connectivity of the visual cortex. They also show that the effects of unilateral enucleation for the visual cortex are not as great as those previously observed for the superior colliculi in the same animals, at least as far as synapse-to-neuron ratios are concerned.