On days 5–8, mice were trained to avoid an obstacle by the presentation of a tone (90 dB, 15 Hz tone; CS) 285 ms before a rung rose (12 mm; US) in the swing phase of their right paws. Steptime is defined as the time needed to place one of the front paws from one rung to the other; and missteps, as the number of touches on the descended rungs. A decrease in post steptime (steptime directly after the CS) over the sessions, implying that mice learn to adjust their stepping patterns to the obstacle, is taken as a measure of associative motor learning. Patch-clamp experiments were performed as recently published (Schonewille et al., 2010). In short, sagittal slices of the cerebellar vermis (250 μm) from adult

mice were made in ice-cold oxygenated “slicing” solution containing (in mM) 2.5 KCl, 1 CaCl2,

3 MgCl2, 25 NaHCO3, 1.25 NaH2PO4, 240 sucrose, learn more and 25 D-glucose. Slices were kept at room temperature (23°C ± 1°C) in oxygenated ACSF containing (in mM) 124 NaCl, 5 KCl, 1.25 Na2HPO4, 2 MgSO4, 2 CaCl2, 26 NaHCO3, 20 D-glucose, and 100 μM picrotoxin. Cyclosporin A (bath applied, 5 μM in 0.5% EtOH) selleck chemicals was added where indicated. Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were performed using an EPC-10 amplifier (HEKA, Lambrecht) and patch pipettes filled with (in mM) 120 K-Gluconate, 9 KCl, 10 KOH, 3.48 MgCl2, 4 NaCl, 10 HEPES, 4 Na2ATP, 0.4 Na3GTP, and 17.5 sucrose (at pH 7.25). PF-PC LTD was induced by pairing PF and CF stimulation at 1 Hz for 5 min, and PF-PC LTP was induced by PF stimulation alone at 1 Hz for 5 min. Test responses (two pulses at 50 ms interval) were evoked every 20 s in voltage-clamp mode to prevent spontaneous spiking. In all experiments, cells were switched to current-clamp mode for tetanization. All values are shown as mean ± SEM. All p values were determined for mutants against pooled (values used here) and mutant-specific controls (see Table S2), using two-tailed Student’s t Bay 11-7085 test, one-way ANOVA, or ANOVA for repeated measures with a posthoc Tukey test to determine significance between the groups. p < 0.05 was considered statistically

significant. See Supplemental Experimental Procedures for a full description of experiments. We kindly thank R. Avila Freire, M. Rutteman, D. Smeets, J. van der Burg, E. Haasdijk, and E. Goedknegt for their technical assistance, and we kindly thank the Dutch Organization for Medical Sciences (F.E.H., C.I.D.Z.), Life Sciences (M.S., F.E.H., C.I.D.Z.), Erasmus University Rotterdam Fellowship program (M.S., F.E.H.), Senter (Neuro-Bsik, C.I.D.Z.), Prinses Beatrix Fonds (C.I.D.Z.), the SENSOPAC program, C7 and CEREBNET of the European Community (C.I.D.Z.), the United States Public Health Service MH51106 (D.J.L.) and NS36715 (R.L.H.), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (R.L.H.) for their financial support. H.J.B. and C.I.D.Z. were supported by Neurasmus B.V. We kindly thank Toyama (Toyama Chemical Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan) for providing the T-588.