Figure 10.

Convergent Innervation Compartmentalization. Examples of innervation patterning onto two multipolar cells (A–D and E–H) and one elongate cell (I–L) receiving convergent innervation from the chorda tympani (CT; red circles) and glossopharyngeal (IX; blue triangles). These cells are also depicted in Figure 9. (B, F, J) A polar histogram of the dendritic orientation shows that the dendrites of all three cells traverse the rNTS roughly parallel to the solitary tract (red line). (C, G, K) For the cell in A, contacts from CT and IX are differentially distributed along the electrotonic dendritic distance from the cell body with CT contacts along the proximal and far distal portions, and IX contacts along the intermediate portions. The other two cells did not display such compartmentalization. (D, H, L) For the cells in A and B, contacts from CT and IX are largely isolated to individual branch segments. The cell in C did not display such a compartmentalization. Note that both types of compartmentalization were only present in multipolar cells although the unavoidably low sample size precludes statistical comparisons between cell types.