Rexed layer

Who is Bror Rexed?

Answer: Bror Rexed was a Swedish neuroscientist who worked to characterize the anatomy of cells in the spinal cord.

bror rexed spinal cord lamina

Bror Rexed was born in 1914. His major scientific studies were published in the early 1950s while he worked at the Karolinska Institute. Here, he conducted experiments to understand the neuroanatomy of the cat spinal cord. Many of these studies are published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

In these works, Rexed and his colleagues used immunohistochemical staining techniques in order to visualize some of the cytoarchitectural differences between the layers of cells within the spinal cord. Rexed used both protein expression and the orientation of the neurons to divide the spinal cord gray matter into 10 layers, which have been named Rexed layers I through X. More often, the phrase “Rexed lamina” is used to describe these layers. He used cats as the model organism for his studies.

According to Rexed’s observations, layers 1 through 6 comprise the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, which represents the input sites of where sensory information enter into the spinal cord (The Cytoarchitectonic atlas of the spinal cord in the cat).