Age-dependent appearance of an insulo-parietal cortical signal propagation that elicits a synchronized population oscillation in the parietal cortex in rats.

We investigated postnatal development of a functional connectivity from the gustatory insular cortex to the parietal cortex, which is known to contain many more neurons responding to oral somesthetic stimulation than the insular cortex, in slices obtained from 9-35-day-old rats. Field potentials were evoked by stimulation to the insular cortex. In the mature cortex, insular stimulation elicited a solitary field potential in both the insular and parietal cortices and, as the simulation continued, the initial solitary potential came to be followed by a population oscillation of field potential in the parietal cortex, but not in the insular cortex. In the immature cortex, by contrast, insular stimulation failed to evoke both the initial solitary potential and the subsequent population oscillation in the parietal cortex. In the mature cortex, application of neither thapsigargin nor AP5 prevented elicitation of the initial solitary potential in the parietal cortex, but either of them abolished the parietal oscillation. In immature cortex bathed with low Mg(2+) medium, insular stimulation elicited both the initial solitary potential and the subsequent parietal oscillation, which were both prevented by thapsigargin or AP5. Theses results suggest that the insular and parietal cortices are anatomically connected but functionally unlinked at an early postnatal stage, and that a functional linkage, dependent both on NMDA and ryanodine receptors, is formed during the first postnatal month.