Does cell lineage in the developing cerebral cortex contribute to its columnar organization?
• 1 Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil • 2 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil • 3 Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil • 4 Laboratório de Neuroanatomia Celular, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Since the pioneer work of Lorente de Nó, Ramón y Cajal, Brodmann, Mountcastle, Hubel and Wiesel and others, the cerebral cortex has been seen as a jigsaw of anatomic and functional modules involved in the processing of different sets of information. In fact, a columnar distribution of neurons displaying similar functional properties throughout the cerebral cortex has been observed by many researchers. Although it has been suggested that much of the anatomical substrate for such organization would be already specified at early developmental stages, b
