摘要BACKGROUND: Morphological studies have confirmed that vestibular nuclei accepts serotoninergic projections from nucleus raphe magnus, nucleus raphes pallidus, etc. But it is still unclear whether there is bi-directional association between vestibular nuclei and nucleus raphe magnus.OBJECTIVE: To observe the characteristics of projective fibers from vestibular nuclei to nucleus raphe magnus using tetramethyl rhodamine (TMR) in rats, so as to provide more sufficient morphological evidence of neural association from vestibular nuclei. DESIGN: An observational experiment. SETTING: Department of Anatomy (K.K. Leung Brain Research Center), the Fourth Military Medical University of Chinese PLA. MATERIALS: Eighteen male SD rats of clean degree, weighing 250-280 g, were provided by the Experimental Animal Center of the Fourth Military Medical University of Chinese PLA. METHODS: The experiments were carried out in the laboratory of Department of Anatomy (K.K. Leung Brain Research Center), the Fourth Military Medical University of Chinese PLA from September 2006 to January 2007. All the rats were anesthetized with intraperitoneal injection of pentobarbital sodium, then according to the coordinates on the rat brain atlas, 0.1 μL TMR (100 g/L) was injected into nucleus raphes magnus via the tip of glass microtubule by means of microinjection. Seven days later, the rats were anesthetized, then perfused and fixed to remove brain, and then frozen coronal brain sections were prepared.The retrogradely labeled neurons in the injected and projected sites were observed under fluorescence microscope. Light filters with evoked wave length of 540-553 nm and emission wave length≥1 580 nm were selected to observe the orange TMR-labeled neurons. All the sections were observed and counted under the fluorescence microscope.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Characteristics and number of retrogradely labeled neurons at different sites of nuclei. RESULTS: Totally 18 SD rats were enrolled, 9 of them were excluded due to the deviation of injected site, and the other 9 were involved in the final analysis of results. The concentrated region of TMR injection wasmainly restricted to nucleus raphes magnus, and diffused to the surrounding area to different extents. There were obvious differences in the distributions of the labeled neurons among the subdivisions in vestibular nuclei, as well as the distributions of the labeled neurons at different sites in the same subdivision. The majority of the labeled neurons distributed in the rostral levels of medial vestibular nucleus and the lateral vestibular nucleus, while fewer labeled neurons were observed in superior vestibular nucleus. CONCLUSION: ①There might be bi-directional association between vestibular nucli and nucleus raphe magnus, suggesting that nucleus raphe magnus played a role in the transmission and processing of vestibular information.②The projection from nucleus raphe magnus to vestibular nucleus has certain distributive characteristics in the region.