Figure 1. Air-puff stimulation of the ipsilateral whisker pad evoked reliable spike firing in basket-type MLIs.

A, Left, whole-cell patch-clamp recording from a basket-type MLI in response to hyperpolarizing (−100 µA), followed by a series of depolarizing (+50 pA/step) current pulses. Right, enlarged trace from the quadrangle shown in the left panel. B, Left, under current-clamp (I = 0), superposition of 20 sequential traces (upper) and raster plot of spike firing (lower) showing the basket-type MLI in response to the air-puff stimulus (arrow, 30 ms). Right, enlarged traces (upper) and raster plot (lower) of left panel. Time point (0) denotes the onset of stimulus. C, Under voltage-clamp (V_hold = −70 mV) conditions, five consecutive traces demonstrate the air-puff stimulation (bar, 30 ms)-evoked EPSCs (right) in the basket cell. D, Left, a photomicrograph depicting the morphology of the basket-type MLI (asterisk) filled with biocytin. Note that the basket cell drops descending collaterals that wrap around at least five PCs soma (arrowheads) and is dye-coupled with a group of other MLIs (arrows). Right, magnified photomicrographs from the quadrangles in the left panel showing the dye-coupled stellate cells at different focal planes. PCL, Purkinje cell layer; ML, molecular layer.