Effects of binocular deprivation on the development of clustered horizontal connections in cat striate cortex

Intrinsic horizontal axon collaterals in the striate cortex of adult cats specifically link columns having the same preferred orientation; consequently, retrograde tracer injections result in intrinsic labeling that is sharply clustered. We have previously shown that the normal development of this circuitry involves the emergence of crude clusters from an unclustered pattern during the second postnatal week. Crude clusters are later refined to the adult level of specificity by the selective rearrangement of axonal arbors that initially project to incorrect orientation columns. Here we report that depriving animals of patterned visual experience by binocular lid suture prior to natural eye opening had no discernible effect on the emergence of crude clusters. In contrast, cluster refinement was dramatically affected by binocular deprivation. Injections of retrograde tracers in the striate cortex of animals binocularly deprived for greater than 1 month revealed only crude clusters, indicating that horizontal axon collaterals projecting to incorrect orientation columns were retained well past the age when they normally would have been eliminated. Layer 2/3 pyramidal cells from 6-week-old binocularly deprived animals had abnormal distributions of intrinsic horizontal axon collaterals that mirrored the lack of cluster refinement. The radial clustering of their horizontal collaterals was considerably less precise than normal. These cells, nevertheless, developed many of the features of normal mature arbors, including the distal axonal branches not seen in arbors from younger animals with normal visual experience. Together, these results indicate that axonal rearrangements occurred, but with reduced specificity. Thus, binocular deprivation did not simply arrest the development of this orientation-specific circuit at an immature state but limited the accuracy with which axon collaterals were added or eliminated. We suggest that development of this orientation-specific circuitry, like ocular dominance column segregation, may depend on temporal correlation of activity for regulation of axonal rearrangement. The specificity of rearrangement may be degraded in binocularly deprived cats because they do not experience sharply oriented visual stimuli necessary for concurrent activation of same-orientation columns.