Developmental increase of total cell numbers in the murine cerebellum

The cerebellum has been widely used as a paradigm to study basic mechanisms of brain development and cortical histogenesis. Its highly regular structure has always made it particularly attractive to approaches relying on, and yielding, quantitative information, which provide a cornerstone of systems-oriented integrative analyses. Astonishingly, though, a systematic quantification of cell generation during cerebellar development has so far not been provided. Here, we use the isotropic fractionator (i.e., cell counts based on tissue homogenates from anatomically defined regions; cf. Herculano-Houzel S, Lent R., J Neurosci. 2005;25:2518-21) to assess the developmental increase of total cell numbers in the murine cerebellum from embryonic day 17 into early adulthood. Our data show that the quantitative increase of cerebellar cell numbers follows a classical, S-shaped growth curve as described by the Hill-equation. The adult murine cerebellum was found to comprise a total of (44.03+/-0.42) * 10(6) cells, half of which are generated before postnatal day 12+/-0.18. Consistent results were obtained by using two approaches to cell counting, one based on manual assessment, the other on flow cytometry. These data provide a reliable quantitative description of cerebellar growth in the mouse and define a predictive model that should allow their integration with quantitative and qualitative descriptions of cerebellar development.