Morphology of retinogeniculate X and Y axon arbors in monocularly enucleated cats

We examined the terminal arbors of single, physiologically identified retinogeniculate X and Y axons from the remaining retinas of adult cats raised from birth with monocular enucleation. These were compared with arbors of X and Y axons in normally reared cats. We used intra-axonal injections of horseradish peroxidase to label each axon after recording its response properties. While the axons in monocularly enucleated cats exhibited normal response properties, both X and Y axons in these cats had abnormally large terminal arbors. Each of the hypertrophied X arbors appeared to be completely confined to the single geniculate lamina A or A1 appropriate to its eye of origin (i.e., lamina A for the contralateral retina and lamina A1 for the ipsilateral retina). In contrast, in addition to their normal terminations, most of the Y arbors seemed to extend well into laminae normally innervated only by the retina that was removed. Thus most or all of the translaminar sprouting previously reported for monocularly enucleated cats appears to reflect extensions of Y axon arbors. These data, in addition to earlier, analogous data from young kittens and cats reared with monocular lid suture, suggest the following sequelae during postnatal development: the retinogeniculate X arbors mature first and develop exuberant arbors that are later competitively pruned as the Y axons expand their innervation of the lateral geniculate nucleus; monocular lid suture prevents the Y axons from succeeding in this competition, so they fail to establish normal arbors and cannot reduce the exuberant X arbors; monocular enucleation offers a less resistant path in the denervated laminae for the rapidly growing Y arbors from the remaining eye, and the expansion of these arbors there reduces the competitive pressure on the exuberant X arbors. Thus, in monocularly enucleated cats, sprouting is limited to Y axons, either because only they possess the capacity to sprout or because they are in the midst of a period of relatively rapid growth at the time of the neonatal enucleation. The X axon arbors are also abnormally large within their appropriate laminae. This occurs presumably because they are able to maintain their immature exuberance, although we cannot rule out the possibility that they are pruned and later regrow to the final size seen in our experiments.