PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Sarah E.V. Richards AU - Anna R. Moore AU - Alice Y. Nam AU - Shikhar Saxena AU - Suzanne Paradis AU - Stephen D. Van Hooser TI - Experience-dependent development of dendritic arbors in mouse visual cortex AID - 10.1101/755934 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 755934 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/03/755934.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/03/755934.full AB - Despite the importance of dendritic arbors for proper neuronal function, our knowledge of how sensory experience influences these structures during postnatal cortical development is incomplete. We present a large-scale dataset of 849 three-dimensional reconstructions of pyramidal neuron basal arbors collected across early postnatal development in the mouse visual cortex. We found that the basal arbor underwent a 45% increase in total length between postnatal day 7 (P7) and P30. Surprisingly, comparisons of dark-reared and typically-reared mice revealed that only 15% of arbor length could be attributed to visual experience. Furthermore, we characterized the role of the activity-regulated small GTPase Rem2, showing that Rem2 is an experience-dependent negative regulator of dendritic segment number during the visual critical period. These data establish a detailed, quantitative analysis of the basal arbor that has high utility for understanding circuit development and providing a framework for computationalists wishing to generate anatomically accurate neuronal models.