A BIPLANAR SLICE PREPARATION FOR STUDYING CEREBELLAR SYNAPTIC TRANSMISSION

Unlike certain other brain areas, notably the hippocampal formation, s ynaptic transmission in the cerebellum, a 3-dimensional anatomical str ucture, is not ideally studied in a 2-dimensional slice preparation, W e describe a method for cutting a cerebellar slice that incorporates t wo planes of section: one sagittal (in the plane of the Purkinje cell dendrites and of afferent and efferent fibres running in the white mat ter), and the other in the plane of the parallel fibres (granule cell axons). Details are given of how neurotransmission in the parallel fib re-to-Purkinje cell pathway and in the messy fibre-to-granule cell pat hway can be studied by applying a specially designed grease-gap record ing technique to the biplanar slice. We further demonstrate the utilit y of the slice for intracellular recording.