Barrels III: Proceedings of a Satellite Symposium of the 1990 Society for Neuroscience Meeting

On October 27 and 28, 1990, approximately 100 somatosensory neurobiologists met in St. Louis, Missouri to discuss the current state of inquiry into the organization of the somatosensory system, emphasizing those portions of the system devoted to processing of inputs from digitized cutaneous organs, such as the rodent mystacial vibrissae. Given the homeomorphic relationship between the vibrissae and cortical and subcortical barrels, a large number of laboratories now employ this model to ask fundamental questions about central processing of sensory inputs, mechanisms controlling topographic pattern formation, and substrates for injury-induced neuronal reorganization. The focus of the third annual Barrels Symposium (Barrels III) was on behavioral aspects of the whisker sense, cholinergic regulation of cortical modules, and genetic and peripheral determinants of barrel development.