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. 2017 Aug 8;7:7608. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-07527-8

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Synaptic connections of the CSTC pathway in humans and rodents. (A) Anatomical distribution of the synaptic connections of the CSTC pathway in the human brain. The CSTC pathway is a multi-synaptic neuronal circuit that connects the cortex, striatum and thalamus. The striatum receives glutamatergic inputs (green) from the cortex and the thalamus and sends out GABAergic (red) inputs to the sub-thalamic nucleus. (B) Anatomical distribution of the synaptic connections of the CSTC pathway in the rodent brain. (C) Schematic representations of the synaptic connections in the CSTC pathway. The two most abundant cell types in the striatum, D1- and D2-MSN, receive glutamatergic inputs from the cortex and the thalamus and inhibit each other via GABAergic synaptic connections. D1- and D2-MSNs send GABAergic signals to other basal ganglia nuclei via direct and indirect connections to the substantia nigra (SNr), respectively. Abbreviations: GPe (globus pallidus external part), GPi (globus pallidus internal part), STN (sub-thalamic nucleus), SNs (substantia nigra pars compacta).