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. 2018 Nov 5;8:16328. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-34312-y

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© The Author(s) 2018

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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Impact of early sensorimotor restriction (SMR) on the topographical organization of somatosensory map devoted to the skin surface representation of the hind limb in control and SMR rats. (A) Illustration of the color code for the somatosensory maps depicted in (B), whose cortical sites display receptive fields (RFs) located on the different skin subdivisions of ventral (left) and dorsal (right) regions of the hind limb, e.g., toes 1 to 5, plantar pads, heel and leg (see Supplementary Methods for details). The hatched zones correspond to cortical sites whose RFs are located on hairy skin surfaces of the hind limb. Sectors in orange correspond to cortical sites whose RFs are located on three or more skin subdivisions of the foot. (B) Representative somatosensory maps serving the cortical representation of hind limb skin surfaces in two control rats. All penetration sites of the microelectrode are depicted by squares, circles or triangles. Note the somatotopic organization despite idiosyncratic differences. (C) Illustration of all RFs located on glabrous hind paw surfaces corresponding to somatosensory maps from the same control rats shown in (B). (D) Somatosensory hind limb maps in two representative SMR rats. Note the reduction of the extent of the somatosensory maps after SMR, concomitant to an increase in the size of glabrous RFs illustrated for the same SMR rats shown in (E). Changes in map areal extent and RF size are plotted in (F and G), respectively. (E) Illustration of glabrous RFs corresponding to somatosensory maps from the same SMR rats depicted in (D). (F) Plots of the areal extent of the different subparts of somatosensory hind limb maps in absolute areas (mm²; left Y axis) or normalized values relative to the ventral or dorsal foot skin surfaces (right Y axis). (G) Plots of the size of all RFs and their subcategories that correspond to those illustrated in (F). Mean + SD. ^*p < 0.05; ^**p < 0.01; ^***p < 0.001, significantly different from controls.