Compartmentalization
From the viewpoint of gross anatomy, the cerebellar cortex appears to be a homogeneous sheet of tissue, and, from the viewpoint of microanatomy, all parts of this sheet appear to have the same internal structure. There are, however, a number of respects in which the structure of the cerebellum is compartmentalized. There are large compartments that are generally known as zones; these can be decomposed into smaller compartments known as microzones.
The first indications of compartmental structure came from studies of the receptive fields of cells in various parts of the cerebellum cortex. Each body part maps to specific points in the cerebellum, but there are numerous repetitions of the basic map, forming an arrangement that has been called "fractured somatotopy". A clearer indication of compartmentalization is obtained by immunostaining the cerebellum for certain types of protein. The best-known of these markers are called "zebrins", because staining for them gives rise to a complex pattern reminiscent of the stripes on a zebra. The stripes generated by zebrins and other compartmentalization markers are oriented perpendicular to the cerebellar folds — that is, they are narrow in the mediolateral direction, but much more extended in the longitudinal direction. Different markers generate different sets of stripes, and the widths and lengths vary as a function of location, but they all have the same general shape.
Oscarsson in the late 1970s proposed that these cortical zones can be partitioned into smaller units called microzones. A microzone is defined as a group of Purkinje cells all having the same somatotopic receptive field. Microzones were found to contain on the order of 1000 Purkinje cells each, arranged in a long, narrow strip, oriented perpendicular to the cortical folds. Thus, as the adjoining diagram illustrates, Purkinje cell dendrites are flattened in the same direction as the microzones extend, while parallel fibers cross them at right angles.
It is not only receptive fields that define the microzone structure: The climbing fiber input from the inferior olivary nucleus is equally important. The branches of a climbing fiber (usually numbering about 10) usually innervate Purkinje cells belonging to the same microzone. Moreover, olivary neurons that send climbing fibers to the same microzone tend to be coupled by gap junctions, which synchronize their activity, causing Purkinje cells within a microzone to show correlated complex spike activity on a millisecond time scale. Also, the Purkinje cells belonging to a microzone all send their axons to the same small cluster of output cells within the deep cerebellar nuclei. Finally, the axons of basket cells are much longer in the longitudinal direction than in the mediolateral direction, causing them to be confined largely to a single microzone. The consequence of all this structure is that cellular interactions within a microzone are much stronger than interactions between different microzones.
In 2005, Richard Apps and Martin Garwicz summarized evidence that microzones themselves form part of a larger entity they call a multizonal microcomplex. Such a microcomplex includes several spatially separated cortical microzones, all of which project to the same group of deep cerebellar neurons, plus a group of coupled olivary neurons that project to all of the included microzones as well as to the deep nuclear area.
Read more about this topic: Cerebellum, Structure