Distribution of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (type 2) in adult male C57Bl/J6 mice (coronal sections)

This dataset contains confocal image data of coronal sections following immunohistochemical staining for muscarinic acetylcholine receptor (type 2) – positive cells. These cells can facilitate the identification of the border between the primary visual cortex and the secondary visual cortex. According to Ji et al. (2015; “Modularity in the Organization of Mouse Primary Visual Cortex”, Neuron, 87, 632-643), layers IV and III in the primary visual cortex show very strong M2-expression levels, layers I, II and Vb moderate and layers VI and Va little to none. In the secondary visual cortex, layer IV shows only moderate expression levels allowing the identification of the border. Additionally, the primary somatosensory cortex shows stronger expression levels compared to its surrounding areas (e.g. secondary visual and somatosensory cortices) in layer IV. The temporal association area and area 36 of the perirhinal cortex show little to no expression in layer IV (see Wang et al., 2011, “Gateways of Ventral and Dorsal Streams in Mouse Visual Cortex”, Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 1905-1918).