The secondary motor cortex (MOs) plays crucial roles in cognitive and executive processes and has reciprocal connections with numerous cortices in rodents. However, descriptions of the neuronal morphologies and projection patterns of the MOs at the level of a single neuron are lacking, severely hindering the comprehensive understanding of the wiring diagram of the MOs. Herein, we used a Cre-dependent adeno-associated virus (AAV) to fluorescently label ~80 pyramidal neurons nearby or in the MOs and acquired an uninterrupted whole-brain 3D dataset at a voxel resolution of 0.2 × 0.2 × 1 μm with a whole-brain fluorescence imaging system (fMOST). Based on our 3D dataset, we reconstructed the complete morphologies of 36 individual intratelencephalic (IT) neurons nearby or in the MOs and analyzed the projection patterns and projection strengths of these neurons at a single-neuron level based on several parameters, including the projection areas, the total number of branches, the fiber length, and the total number of terminal tips. We obtained a neuron with an axonal length of 318.43 mm, which is by far the longest reported axonal length. Our results show that all individual neurons in the MOs, regardless of whether they are located in layer 2/3 or layer 5, display diverse projection patterns and projection strengths, implying that these neurons might be involved in different brain circuits at different intensities. The results lay a solid foundation for exploring the relationship between neuronal morphologies and behavioral functions of the MOs at the level of a single neuron.
Keywords: adeno-associated virus (AAV); neuronal morphology; secondary motor cortex (MOs); single intratelencephalic neurons (IT); whole-brain mapping.