Therefore, we here investigated whether areas belonging to the large-scale fronto-temporal language network for sentence comprehension differ in their receptor

fingerprints or share a common multireceptor expression, despite the fact that the areas are widely distributed between the temporal and frontal lobes. In each of these areas, multiple excitatory, selleck chemicals inhibitory and modulatory transmitter receptors subserve the local computational processes. Here we hypothesized, that areas constituting the fronto-temporal language network may not only be characterized by similar receptor fingerprints, but also that their fingerprints differ from those of areas subserving non-language functions, i.e., different unimodal sensory, motor or multimodal functions. Brain regions were examined in the left and right hemispheres of brains obtained from individuals (two males and two females; 77 ± 2 years of age) with no clinical records

of neurological or psychiatric disorders, who participated in the body donor program of the Department of Anatomy, University of Düsseldorf. Causes of death were pulmonary edema, multiorgan failure, bronchial cancer, or sudden cardiac death. Brains were removed from the skull within 24 h after death. Each hemisphere was dissected into five or six slabs in the coronal plane (25–30 mm thickness), frozen in isopentane at −40 °C and stored at −70 °C. Using a large-scale cryostat microtome, each DNA Damage inhibitor slab comprising a coronal section through the complete human hemisphere was cut into continuous series of coronal sections (20 μm thickness), which were thaw-mounted onto glass slides. Cortical areas studied here could be divided Sirolimus in vivo into two major groups, i.e., areas involved in language, particularly in sentence comprehension, and “non-language” related areas, which do not belong to this fronto-temporal language network. Three regions (44d, IFS1/IFJ, and pSTG/STS, Fig. 1A) were functionally (IFS1/IFJ, pSTG/STS; Friederici et al., 2006, Friederici et al., 2009,

Grewe et al., 2005 and Makuuchi et al., 2009) and additionally receptor architectonically (44d; Amunts et al., 2010) defined. These three regions were found to be activated during processing of syntactically complex, embedded sentences (Friederici et al., 2009 and Makuuchi et al., 2009). An involvement of 44d was also reported for the processing of non-canonical object first sentences (Friederici et al., 2006 and Grewe et al., 2005). These regions were localized in the postmortem brains using their characteristic anatomical landmarks (i.e., sulci and gyri). Five further language-related regions (44v, 45a, 45p, 47 and Te2, Fig. 1A) were defined based on cyto- and receptor architectonical criteria.