Thalamic afferents to the visual cortex in congenitally anophthalmic mice.

Retrograde cell labelling with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) has been used to study the thalamic afferents to the primary visual cortex (area 17) in mutant H1-ZRDCT-An ('eyeless') mice, in which the eyes are missing throughout development. Injections of HRP that were localised to a subregion of area 17, resulted in the labelling of a group of neurons in the ipsilateral dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, showing the existence of a point-to-point connectivity. Many labelled cells were also found in other posterior thalamic nuclei especially in the lateral posterior nucleus which in normal animals contain very few or no labelled cells.