Do Developing Merkel Cells in Vibrissal Tactile Receptors Provide a Template for Pattern Formation in the Trigeminal System?

The trigeminal pathway in rodents has served as an important model for studying pattern formation in the central nervous system. In this pathway there is a topographic point-to-point relation between the array of mystacial vibrissae on the whisker pad and their central projections in the barrel-field of the somatosensory cortex (Woolsey and Van der Loos, 1970; Welker, 1976; Belford and Killackey, 1980). Among the peripheral receptor sites the …