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Climbing fibres - a key to cerebellar function

Carl-Fredrik Ekerot

Due to the unique features of cerebellar climbing fibres, their extremely powerful synapses on the Purkinje cells and the lack of convergence there has been much speculation about their function. As early as 1970 Miller and Oscarsson suggested that climbing fibres carried information about differences between intended and actual movements (Ito, 1984). This was based on the convergence between ascending spinal cord pathways and descending cerebral cortical inputs in the inferior olive, the origin of climbing fibres. This idea had a strong influence on several theories of cerebellar function advanced in the seventies (for references see Ito, 1984), in which mossy fibres were assumed to carry information used for the immediate control of movements whereas climbing fibres carried information about errors in motor performance. Climbing fibre activity was assumed to induce plastic changes of parallel fibre synapses thereby, in an adaptive manner, eliminating errors in motor performance as shown schematically in Fig. 1A. Although not undisputed, these theories have gained substantial experimental support. The predicted long term depression (LTD) of parallel synapses active in conjunction with climbing fibres was first demonstrated by Ito and colleagues in 1982 (see Ito, 1984) and has been investigated both at a cellular and at a molecular level (Ito, 1989).